They had trudged the better part of two miles when they came upon the horse tethered by the reins to one of two gate-pillars, which stood gateless beside the road. Colonel John got to his saddle, and they trotted on. Notwithstanding which it was late in the afternoon when they approached the town of Tralee.
In those days it was a town much ruined. The grim castle of the Desmonds, scene of the midnight murder which had brought so many woes on Ireland, still elbowed the grey Templars Cloister, and looked down, as it frowned across the bay, on the crumbling aisles and squalid graves of the Abbey. To Bale, as he scanned the dark pile, it was but a keep—a mere nothing beside Marienburg or Stettin—rising above the hovels of an Irish town. But to the Irishman it stood for many a bitter memory and many a crime, besides that murder of a guest which will never be forgotten. The Colonel sighed as he gazed.
Presently his eyes dropped to the mean houses which flanked the entrance to the town; and he recognised that if all the saints had not vouchsafed their company, the delay caused by the meeting with the priest had done somewhat. For at that precise moment a man was riding into the town before them, and the horse under the man was Flavia McMurrough's lost mare.
Colonel John's eye lightened as he recognised its points. With a sign to Bale he fell in behind the man and followed him through two or three ill-paved and squalid streets. Presently the rider passed through a loop-holed gateway, before which a soldier was doing sentry-go. The two followed. Thence the quarry crossed an open space surrounded by dreary buildings which no military eye could take for aught but a barrack yard. The two still followed—the sentry staring after them. On the far side of the yard the mare and its rider vanished through a second archway, which appeared to lead to an inner court. The Colonel, nothing intimidated, went after them. Fortune, he thought, had favoured him.
But as he emerged from the tunnel-like passage he raised his head in astonishment. A din of voices, an outbreak of laughter and revelry, burst in a flood of sound upon his ears. He turned his face in the direction whence the sounds came, and saw three open windows, and at each window three or four flushed countenances. His sudden emergence from the tunnel, perhaps his look of surprise, wrought an instant's silence, which was followed by a ruder outburst.
"Cock! cock! cock!" shrieked a tipsy voice, and an orange, hurled at random, missed the Colonel's astonished face by a yard. The mare which had led him so far had disappeared, and instinctively he drew bridle. He stared at the window.
"Mark one!" cried a second roisterer, and a cork, better aimed than the orange, struck the Colonel sharply on the chin. A shout of laughter greeted the hit.
He raised his hat. "Gentlemen," he remonstrated, "gentlemen——"
He could proceed no further. A flight of corks, a renewed cry of "Cock! cock! cock!" a chorus of "Fetch him, Ponto! Dead, good dog! Find him, Ponto!" drowned his remonstrances. Perhaps in the scowling face at his elbow—for William Bale had followed him and was looking very fierce indeed—the wits of the —th found more amusement than in the master's mild astonishment.
"Who the devil is he?" cried one of the seniors, raising his voice above the uproar. "English or Irish?"