She was trying to laugh to cheer herself, but she made a poor job of it.
“Sure I am, Mary. As right as rain. Everything will be all right. Of course it will. Don’t worry.”
There was a long silence. They sat close together, looking at the ground.
“Tell me, Dan,” whispered Mary awkwardly, “did you see anything that time? When you were looking at the wall? Did you see anything? Tell me, quick. It’s such a queer place, this. I think there are devils in it.”
“Damn it!” snapped Gallagher. “Why did you bring the subject up again, when I want to forget it? Devils! Huh! Devils!”
He jumped to his feet and took two paces forward, stretching his hands out over his head with peculiar intensity, like a man with a rheumatic twinge in his shoulder blades. Then he shrugged himself and rattled off with startling suddenness, in a quite calm voice, cheerful and debonair.
“You are right,” he said, “after all, in asking the question. I should have explained at the time,” he yawned, “what I meant by seeing him. Of course I was speaking figuratively. There are no such things as devils, at least not supernatural creations, as the current superstition understands them to be. The only devils to be afraid of are human devils. I know numbers of them. They are real enough. But they wear sheep’s clothing. Respectable, law-abiding fellows. I’ll see them again in a few hours, if Gypo gets to the police station with his story. They’ll drawl out slowly their sentence on me. Ha! Pretty boys. And here I am doing nothing while they are …”
He moved rapidly up and down again, clutching his hands behind his back, jerking his body about and crunching his teeth.
“I am alone,” he continued. “Alone. I stand alone. They can easily buy off the rest of the Executive Committee. They’ll be only too glad to get away free, with their lives, at any cost, if it comes to a fight. If evidence is found against me, sufficient to prove certain things, they can strike at me with impunity. My own rank and file would be the first to stone me to death. Their damn superstitions always stand in the way of revolutionary beliefs. They talk at International Headquarters about romanticism and leftism and all sorts of freak notions. What do they know about the peculiar type of hog mind that constitutes an Irish peasant?”
“How dare you?” cried Mary indignantly.
He looked at her. Her eyes were flashing. She sat erect on the form. He had never seen a woman wild and imperious like that. He smiled weakly.
“Sorry to hurt your feelings,” he said cynically. “But I’m beyond that. Pish! I’ve got the whole country in a fine net and I’m within the law until they find something definite to go upon. I can snap my fingers at the lot of you.” He grew fierce and arrogant. “You and your patriotic ideas! I was wrong about you. I don’t want you. I never wanted you. Do you hear? I snap my fingers at the whole world. That hulking swine can do his best. I will drain his blood before dawn. Mark my words. He’ll never reach the police station. My destiny stands against him. And—”
Just then the sentry’s challenge rang out. Gallagher immediately stood stock-still and listened. Then he rushed into the passage, drawing his pistol and muttering something. Two men were hurrying down the stairs. The first of them came up smartly to Gallagher and clicked his heels.
He was a small, slight man, with hawk’s eyes and a long, pointed, curved nose. He wore a loose raincoat and a check cap. He was Billy Burton, an Insurance Agent, a captain in the Revolutionary Organization. Gallagher shook hands with him eagerly.
“Glad they found you in, Billy,” he said. “You’re the very man I want.”
He led Burton into the guardroom and rapidly explained the situation. Then he detailed a plan. He detailed the plan coolly and minutely as if he had spent weeks at it.
Burton listened, blinking his little eyes, sniffing, biting his nails, fondling the butt of his automatic pistol in his breast pocket.
Over on the form, Flynn was sitting, with his broken jaw swathed in a red silk handkerchief. He sat impassively, inscrutably communing with himself. He seemed to be unconscious of his surroundings, with his mind fixed immutably on some infinite problem.
The only sounds in the room were the drip, drip of the water from the many roofs and the patter of Gallagher’s voice.
His voice was again cold, hard, dominating, vital.
XVI
At a quarter to four the drizzling rain ceased. A sharp bustling wind arose. It came screaming down from the mountains upon Dublin. It was a hard, mountainous wind, a lean, sulky, snowy wind, that rushed through the sleeping city savagely, so that even the drops of rain on the muddy sidewalks leaned over before it, with frills on them.
The clouds arose, their hanging rumps cut away by the newborn wind. They hung high up in the heavens, gashed and torn, with a sour expression on their grey, slattern bodies. Here and there a rent came in the dishevelled panorama of cloud and the sky appeared, blue and chaste and a long way off.
This change in the mood of nature occurred when Gypo was bounding away from the Bogey Hole, trembling shakily with excess of energy. He ran through a short, narrow lane, so narrow that his shoulders grazed either side as he dashed through. He crossed a thoroughfare in four strides, casting a look on either side as he leaped across. He saw a sloppy roadway on one side, with a watchman’s glowing brazier at the far end and on the other side a hill. Tall tenement houses lined the thoroughfare, their battered old walls rambling up towards the sky, their squalor hidden by the majesty of the night.
He fled across the road and entered a dark archway. Then he bumped suddenly against an
