Within a few days an armed party went to their houses and shot the three in their legs.
One man's life was despaired of for some time, but finally they all recovered.
This outrage was a rather late one, because the Land League latterly decided to shoot objectionable characters only in the legs, because though a fuss was made at the time, if a man was killed it was soon forgotten afterwards, whereas a lame man was a lifelong testimony to their power.
There is a man hobbling about Castleisland to this day, who was peppered in this comparatively humanitarian way. I am quite sure he would say such a comparison had proved odious.
Judge Barry very truly said that a thatched cabin on a mountain-side was not much of a place of defence, and if the tenant was supposed to have paid his rent, he would be told to run out with probably three men standing at the door to shoot him. That was terrorism as inculcated by the so-called friends of Ireland.
Mr. Forster in his plucky speech to the crowd at Tullamore, said:—
'I went when I was at Tulla to the workhouse, and there saw a poor fellow lying in bed, the doctors around him, with a blue light over his face that made me feel that the doctors were not right, when they told me he might get over it. I felt sure that he must die, and I see this morning that he has died. But why did that man die? He was a poor lone farmer. I believe he had paid his rent—I believe he had committed that crime. He thought it his duty to pay. Fifteen or sixteen men broke into his house in the middle of the night, pulled him out of his bed and told him they would punish him. He himself, lying in his death agony as it were, told me the story. He said, "My wife went down on her knees and said, 'Here are five helpless children, will you kill their father?'" They took him out, they discharged a gun filled with shot into his leg, so closely that they shattered his leg.'
Now there were dozens of instances of that kind of thing in Kerry.
Mr. Parnell started the whole vile crusade, when at Ennis he gave the advice to shun any man who had bid for a farm from which a tenant had been evicted.
'Shun him in the street, in the shop, in the marketplace, even in the place of worship, as if he were a leper of old.'