"Water, sir," he pronounced, "dirty water, with a small indication of sperrits."
A junior constable tittered explosively, met the light blue glare of Murray's eye, and withered away.
"Perhaps it's holy water!" said I, with a wavering voice.
Murray's glance pinned me like an assegai, and I also faded into the background.
"Well," said Flurry in dulcet tones, "if you want to know where the stuff is that was in those barrels, I can tell you, for I was told it myself half-an-hour ago. It's gone to Cork with the Bishop by special train!"
Mr. Canty was undoubtedly a man of resource. Mrs. Canty had mistakenly credited me with an intelligence equal to her own, and on receiving from Slipper a highly coloured account of how audibly Mr. Canty had slept off his potations, had regarded the secret of Holy Island as having been given away. That night and the two succeeding ones were spent in the transfer of the rum to bottles, and the bottles and the butter to fish boxes; these were, by means of a slight lubrication of the railway underlings, loaded into a truck as "Fresh Fish, Urgent," and attached to the Bishop's funeral train, while the police, decoyed far from the scene of action, were breaking their backs over barrels of bog-water. "I suppose," continued Flurry pleasantly, "you don't know the pub that Canty's brother has in Cork. Well, I do. I'm going to buy some rum there next week, cheap."
"I shall proceed against Canty," said Murray, with fateful calm.
"You won't proceed far," said Flurry; "you'll not get as much evidence out of the whole country as'd hang a cat."
"Who was your informant?" demanded Murray.
Flurry laughed. "Well, by the time the train was in Cork, yourself and the Major were the only two men in the town that weren't talking about it."