VII.
Sub-Inspector Blake told off ten men for special duty on Nov. 1, and about noon arrived with them on three outside cars in the little town of Mohill. “Now, boys,” was his parting advice, “this fellow Jones is a tough-looking customer, and will probably show fight. Brennan’s a rowdy, too. When I whistle, rush in and baton both of ’em if they show fight. If any of the hangers-on in the hotel seem ugly, give them the bayonet.”
“Two men with myself will be enough,” finally remarked Spriggins to Head Constable Walsh, of Mohill. “Our bird’s in the commercial room of the Railway Hotel just now. Perhaps ’twould be better, to avoid suspicion, if your men didn’t come in uniform, and they might wait outside till I whistled for them.”
It was so arranged.
Sergeant Crawley sat in the commercial room of the little hotel, describing the personal peculiarities of the fore-doomed Jones to three official Goliaths who had joined him from Dublin, when the door opened and the redoubtable Jones entered himself. Seeing his prey in deep consultation with three sturdy farmers, Jones muttered softly to himself, “By Jingo, I’ve got the whole crowd!” and instantly sounding the signal, sprang upon Crawley with a drawn pistol in his right hand and the warrant fluttering in his left.
“Holy Moses!” gasped Crawley; “they mean to murder us too,” and he ducked under the table, where Spriggins let go three or four shots at him, while two G men rushed at Spriggins and two local constables grappled with the two G men, and the remaining Dublin detective began a racket on his own account by firing round promiscuously, taking a chip off Spriggins’ ear, slicing a cutlet off Crawley’s cheek, and depositing one of the Mohill men on the half-shell, as it were, by a shot in the abdomen. At this moment Sub-Inspector Blake, his soul afire with war’s dread echoes, leaped into the apartment just in time to receive on his sconce the full weight of a brass spittoon fired by Sergeant Crawley, who, from his intrenchment under the table, was carrying on a destructive artillery bombardment of similar bombshells and grenades. Of course Blake sounded the alarm, and his followers charged with fixed bayonets into the room. They skivered Spriggins, they splintered Crawley, they committed multifarious ravages upon the sacred skins of the Dublin detectives, and in the joyous exhilaration of the hour they skewered each other up against the wainscoating, and pinned each other against the table, and prodded each other through the arms and legs of chairs and couches, and shed each other’s blood for their Queen and Constitution in the most liberal and disinterested manner. Finally, when there wasn’t a square three-inch patch of whole skin among the combined forces, the chambermaids and waiters came in and took the entire lot prisoners. Then followed mutual explanations, a reciprocal production of warrants, general expressions of regret, and a mournfully unanimous feeling that amongst the dark, unsolved problems of agrarian crimes would ever remain the awful mystery of who shot Phineas Phlynn’s hat.
THE RED-HEART DAISY.
A RUSSIAN ALLEGORY.
THE clouds of battle-tempest had blown over;
The storm of wrath
Had swept through fields of ripening corn and clover,
And in its path
Had left the human cyclone’s awful traces
In quivering bodies and distorted faces.
Among the bloody drift of dead and dying
That strewed the ground,
A Prince and Serf, in Death’s communion lying,
The searchers found.
Earth drank both life-streams; as their current ended,
Blue blood and peasant’s in one tide had blended.
Some essence from the forms interred together
Enriched the clay,
And toned with deeper tints the patch of heather
’Neath which they lay—
Rough hide and dainty skin—deep brain and hollow—
Silver and iron—Vulcan and Apollo.