WHY SMITHERS RESIGNED.
SO you wish to know why Smithers resigned his position as head constable of Kilmacswiggin? Well, as the night’s young, and I’m not particularly busy, I don’t mind spending half an hour or so in telling you the story.
You see, during the time of the Land League troubles, some of the landlords round here, knowing that they had little reason to expect any overwhelming affection from their tenants, and finding their sources of income, if not castles in the air, at least rents in the clouds, for bad luck to the penny they could collect, began to get uneasy and scared, and thought it would be a wise thing to have a dozen or so more police in the parish, though it’s too many of the same streelers were quartered on us to begin with. The district, barring that the farmers kept their money in their own pockets and used strong language when the rent collector called on them, was quiet, and peaceable, and could have been easily managed without a peeler at all, but the landlords wanted bad to force their rents out of the poor peasantry or take their land from them, as they used to do in the cruel times before the League stepped in and put an extinguisher on their proceedings.
So, as the people couldn’t be tempted to make fools of themselves by playing into the land-grabbers’ hands by such frolics as popping at their agents with old blunderbusses from the back of a hedge, or setting fire to process servers’ hayricks, the landlords began to manufacture outrages on their own account. They wrote threatening letters to each other by the bushel, with skulls, and crossbones, and coffins for date lines, and blood, and blasphemy, and murder reeking in every sentence, and pikes, and guns, and pistols below the signature of “Captain Moonlight” or “Rory of the Hills,” to show how terribly in earnest they were. Oh, they constructed those epistles in the orthodox manner recognized by Mr. Trench in his “Recollections of an Irish Landlord,” and made familiar to the world by the regiments of English special correspondents that were then roaming and perambulating Ireland like journalistic ghouls or body-snatchers looking for corpses to be dissected in the columns of their respective organs. They wrote, too, blood-curdling, gruesome, harrowing narratives of the horrors of life in Kilmacswiggin for the London papers, till one of the Orange members from the North drew attention in the House to what he called the terrible state of affairs in that parish, and, though Healy and Biggar contradicted his assertions, and laughed at his lugubrious forebodings of massacre, rapine, blood, and flame if a whole corps d’armee and a part of the channel squadron wasn’t immediately sent to occupy the bogs and ditches there, the then chief secretary, Buckshot Forster, promised to see into the matter, and he wrote to the head inspector in Dublin, Col. Hillier, and Hillier sent a letter down to Smithers that made that head constable’s ears tingle. He as much as told Smithers that if he didn’t arrest somebody for something or other he might take out his walking papers. Of course Smithers was in a quandary. He’d willingly have arrested the whole parish, man, woman, and child, if he could have found the shadow of an excuse, but he couldn’t, poor fellow.
Just at this time it happened that Pat Moran, at the far end of the parish, was engaged in a little business speculation on his own account, in the shape of a brisk trade in the finest poteen that was ever distilled in these parts—and that’s a big word. The still was away somewhere in the mountains,—it may be there yet, so I shan’t go into geographical details,—and Pat was employed as a kind of messenger between the boys there and some of the hotel keepers and grocers in the towns and villages round who don’t believe in contributing any more to the British revenue than they can help. Maybe he visited me sometimes, and maybe he didn’t. That’s neither here nor there. I may just observe that I never pay taxes willingly. You can take what you like out of that.
Some of Pat’s neighbors grew envious of the good luck he was having, and one day some sleeveen—it was never found out who the stag was—came into the barracks and told Head Constable Smithers that Pat Moran had guns and powder and shot hid away in his old cabin. The sly rogue knew that if he complained to Smithers that it was merely illicit whiskey Pat had, the head constable wouldn’t give a thraneen about the matter, and as like as not would let Pat alone. But the mention of contraband material of war worked up Smithers like a touch of electricity. Why, if he could manage to seize a few rifles and a cartridge or two of dynamite, his fortune was made, his position assured. There was no position he might not attain. He would succeed Clifford Lloyd. He might be made a K. C. B. Dim visions of a peerage even floated through his brain.
In five minutes he was en route for Pat’s, with a dozen constabulary men at his back. How Pat found out he was coming I can’t say; but he did find out while Smithers was still half a mile away. Pat had a hurried consultation with his mother. He had no time to shift a keg of poteen which was in the house, but they hit upon a ruse which might succeed, and at any rate couldn’t make things worse. They wheeled the keg of whiskey under the bed in the back room, and in another minute Pat was lying on the bed with his head enveloped in a Tara hill of bandages, awaiting the crisis.
The crisis came. So did the police. In fact, they came together. The search began. The peelers explored the teapot and kettle for rifles, and seemed disappointed when they found no artillery in the skillet. They sounded the hearthstone, analyzed the cradle, held a sort of post-mortem examination on the furniture, and poked the roof so effectually with their bayonets that it resembled the lid of a pepper-box. The commander went so far as to make the youngest of the force ascend the chimney. He found nothing there but soot. However, he brought enough of that back with him to satisfy his most ardent desires.
Then Smithers prepared to enter the back room, but the old woman clung to his arm and tearfully beseeched him not to do so.
“Ha! ha!” cried the enterprising officer, bursting the door in with his foot, “I smell a rat,” and he rushed into the room, where the first object to meet his gaze was a head raised languidly from the pillow, and poulticed and bandaged to the size of a champion squash or watermelon.