“Don’t you mane it?” he cried. “The O’Mahony come back to his own ag’in? W’u’d he—is it—oh, thin, ‘t is too good to be thrue, sir! An’ we sittin’ here! An’ him near by! An’ me not—ah, come along out ’o this! An’ ye’re not desayvin’ us, sir? He’s thruly come back to us?”
“Don’t go too fast,” remonstrated Bernard “It’s only guess-work There’s nothing sure about it at all. Only there’s no one else who could have come here.”
“Thrue for ye, sir!” exclaimed Jerry, all afire now with joyous confidence. “’T is a fine, grand intelligince ye have, sir. An’ will we be goin’, now, major, to find him?”
Under the influence of Jerry’s great excitement, the other two had risen to their feet as well.
The resident magistrate toyed dubiously with his revolver, casting sharp glances of scrutiny from one to the other of the faces before him, the while he pondered the probabilities of truth in the curious tale to which he had listened.
The official side of him clamored for its entire rejection as a lie. Like most of his class, with their superficial and hostile observation of an alien race, his instincts were all against crediting anything which any Irish peasant told him, to begin with. Furthermore, the half of this strange story had been related by an Irish-American—a type regarded by the official mind in Ireland with a peculiar intensity of suspicion. Yes, he decided, it was all a falsehood.
Then he looked into the young man’s face once more, and wavered. It seemed an honest face. If its owner had borne even the homeliest and most plebeian of Saxon labels, the major was conscious that he should have liked him. The Milesian name carried prejudice, it was true, but—
“Yes, we will go up,” he said, “in the manner I described. I don’t see what your object would be in inventing this long rigmarole. Of course, you can see that if it isn’t true, it will be so much the worse for you.”
“We ought to see it by this time,” said Bernard, with a suggestion of weariness. “You’ve mentioned it often enough. Here, take the lantern. We’ll go up ahead. The door locks itself. I have the key.”
The three men made their way up the dark, tortuous flight of stairs, replaced the lantern and key on their peg in Jerry’s room, and emerged once more into the open. They filled their lungs with long breaths of the fresh air, and then looked rather vacuously at one another. The major had pocketed his weapon.