"--And thin told him that I felt better; but as we marched down through the crowd and saw the fright of the men, and the women screaming in their night-gowns at the windows, faith, I well-nigh choked."
"Have you spoken to Ryan about this absurd suspicion, O'Grady?"
"I spoke to him, but I might as well have spoke to a brick wall. Divil a thing could I get out of him. How did you manage it at all, lad?"
"How could I manage it?" Terence said, indignantly. "No, no, O'Grady; I know you did make some remark about that scare at Athlone, and said it would be fun to have one here. I was a little shocked at hearing such a thing from, as you often say, a superior officer, and it certainly appears to me that it was you who first broached the idea. So I have much more right to feel a suspicion that you had a hand in the carrying of it out than for you to suspect me."
"Well, Terence," O'Grady said, in an insinuating way, "I won't ask you any questions now, and maybe some day when you have marched away from this place, you will tell me the ins and outs of the business."
"Maybe, O'Grady, and perhaps you will also confess to me how you managed to bring the scare about."
"Go along wid you, Terence, it is yourself knows better than anyone else that I had nothing to do with it, and I will never forgive you until you make a clean breast of it to me."
"We shall see about it," Terence laughed. "Anyhow, if you allude to the subject again, I shall feel it my duty to inform the colonel of my reasons for suspecting that you were concerned in spreading those false reports last night."
"It was first-rate, wasn't it?" Dick Ryan said, as he joined Terence, when the latter left the mess-room.
"It was good fun, Dicky; but I tell you, for a time I was quite as much scared as anyone else. I never thought that it would have gone quite so far. When it came to all the troops turning out, and Sir John and everyone, I felt that there would be an awful row if we were ever found out."