England had made of Ireland a desert and called it peace, she had not marred its beauty. That was the thought in Colonel Sullivan's mind as he rode eastward under Slieve Mish, with the sun rising above the lower spurs of the mountain, and the lark saluting the new-born radiance with a song attuned to the freshness of the morning. Where his road ascended he viewed the sparkling inlet spread far to the southward; and where the track dipped, the smooth slopes on either side ran up to grey crags that, high above, took strange shapes, now of monstrous heads, now of fantastic towers. As his sure-footed nag forded the brown bog-stream, long-shanked birds rose silently from the pools, and he marked with emotion the spots his boyhood had known: the shallow where the dog-wolf – so big that it had become a fable – died biting, and the cliff whence the sea-eagle's nest had long bidden him defiance.
Bale rode behind him, taciturn, comparing, perhaps, the folds of his native Suffolk hills with these greener vales. They reached the hedge tavern, where the mare had been seized, and they stayed to bait their horses, but got no news. About eight they rode on; and five long Irish miles nearer Tralee, though still in a wild and lonely country, they viewed from the crest of a hill a piece of road stretched ribbon-like before them, and on it a man walking from them at a great pace. He had for companion a boy, who trotted beside him.
Neither man nor boy looked back, and it did not seem to be from fear of the two riders that they moved so quickly. The man wore a loose drugget coat and an old jockey-cap, and walked with a stout six-foot staff. Thus armed and dressed he should have stood in small fear of robbers. Yet when Colonel John's horse, the tread of its hoofs deadened by the sod road, showed its head at his shoulder, and he sprang aside, he turned a face of more vivid alarm than seemed necessary. And he crossed himself.
Colonel John touched his hat. "I give you good morning, good man," he said.
The walker raised his hand to his cap as if to return the salute, but lowered it without doing so. He muttered something.
"You will be in haste?" Colonel John continued. He saw that the sweat stood in beads on the man's brow, and the lad's face was tear-stained.
"I've far to go," the man muttered. He spoke with a slight foreign accent, but in the west of Ireland this was common. "The top of the morning to you."
Plainly he wished the two riders to pass on, but he did not slacken his speed for a moment. So for a space they went abreast, the man, with every twenty paces, glancing up suspiciously. And now and again, the boy, as he ran or walked, vented a sob.
The Colonel looked about him. The solitude of the valley was unbroken. No cabin smoked, no man worked within sight, so that the haste of these two, their sweating faces, their straining steps, seemed portentous. "Shall I take up the lad?" Colonel John asked.
Plainly the man hesitated. Then, "You will be doing a kindness," he panted. And, seizing the lad in two powerful arms, he swung him to the Colonel's stirrup, who, in taking him, knocked off the other's jockey-cap.
The man snatched it up and put it on with a single movement. But Colonel John had seen what he expected.
"You walk on a matter of life and death?" he said.
"It is all that," the man answered; and this time his look was defiant.
"You are taking the offices, father?"
The man did not reply.
"To one who is near his end, I suspect?"
The priest – for such he was – glanced at the weapon Colonel John wore. "You can do what you will," he said sullenly. "I am on my duty."
"And a fine thing, that!" Colonel John answered heartily. He drew rein, and, before the other knew what he would be at, he was off his horse. "Mount, father," he said, "and ride, and God be with you!"
For a moment the priest stared dumbfounded. "Sir," he said, "you wear a sword! And no son of the Church goes armed in these parts."
"If I am not one of your Church I am a Christian," Colonel John answered. "Mount, father, and ride in God's name, and when you are there send the lad back with the beast."
"The Mother of God reward you!" the priest cried fervently, "and turn your heart in the right way!" He scrambled to the saddle. "The blessing of all – "
The rest was lost in the thud of hoofs as the horse started briskly, leaving Colonel John standing alone upon the road beside Bale's stirrup. The servant looked after the retreating pair, but said nothing.
"It's something if a man serves where he's listed," Colonel John remarked.
Bale smiled. "And don't betray his own side," he said. He slipped from his saddle.
"You think it's the devil's work we've done?" Colonel John asked.
But Bale declined to say more, and the two walked on, one on either side of the horse, master or man punching it when it showed a desire to sample the herbage. A stranger, seeing them, might have thought that they were wont to walk thus, so unmoved were their faces.
They had trudged the better part of two miles when they came upon the horse tethered by the reins to one of two gate-pillars, which stood gateless beside the road. Colonel John got to his saddle, and they trotted on. Notwithstanding which it was late in the afternoon when they approached the town of Tralee.
In those days it was a town much ruined. The grim castle of the Desmonds, scene of the midnight murder which had brought so many woes on Ireland, still elbowed the grey Templars Cloister, and looked down, as it frowned across the bay, on the crumbling aisles and squalid graves of the Abbey. To Bale, as he scanned the dark pile, it was but a keep – a mere nothing beside Marienburg or Stettin – rising above the hovels of an Irish town. But to the Irishman it stood for many a bitter memory and many a crime, besides that murder of a guest which will never be forgotten. The Colonel sighed as he gazed.
Presently his eyes dropped to the mean houses which flanked the entrance to the town; and he recognised that if all the saints had not vouchsafed their company, the delay caused by the meeting with the priest had done somewhat. For at that precise moment a man was riding into the town before them, and the horse under the man was Flavia McMurrough's lost mare.
Colonel John's eye lightened as he recognised its points. With a sign to Bale he fell in behind the man and followed him through two or three ill-paved and squalid streets. Presently the rider passed through a loop-holed gateway, before which a soldier was doing sentry-go. The two followed. Thence the quarry crossed an open space surrounded by dreary buildings which no military eye could take for aught but a barrack yard. The two still followed – the sentry staring after them. On the far side of the yard the mare and its rider vanished through a second archway, which appeared to lead to an inner court. The Colonel, nothing intimidated, went after them. Fortune, he thought, had favoured him.
But as he emerged from the tunnel-like passage he raised his head in astonishment. A din of voices, an outbreak of laughter and revelry, burst in a flood of sound upon his ears. He turned his face in the direction whence the sounds came, and saw three open windows, and at each window three or four flushed countenances. His sudden emergence from the tunnel, perhaps his look of surprise, wrought an instant's silence, which was followed by a ruder outburst.
"Cock! cock! cock!" shrieked a tipsy voice, and an orange, hurled at random, missed the Colonel's astonished face by a yard. The mare which had led him so far had disappeared, and instinctively he drew bridle. He stared at the window.
"Mark one!" cried a second roisterer, and a cork, better aimed than the orange, struck the Colonel sharply on the chin. A shout of laughter
