The other man laid down his knife and tried to edge through the door; but I stopped him.
“Now you are here,” said I, “you shall stay here till I please. Help me to lift Tim; and the first of you that stirs for anything else is a dead man.”
We lifted Tim tenderly—I could see, now that the heat of passion was cooled, that the men really respected him and deplored the upshot of the unexpected encounter—and we laid him gently on the table. My heart almost stopped beating as I noted the ghastly pallor of his face and saw the blood running over his temple. He opened his eyes in a dazed way for a moment; but if he saw me he did not know me. I bandaged his wound as best I could, and soaking my kerchief in a pool of rain-water, which had oozed through and on to the window-ledge, moistened his parched lips.
“Now,” said I, sternly enough, stooping over Martin, on whom—with hardly a ray of pity for him in my heart, I fear—I could see the hand of death was laid, “one question for you: where is Maurice Gorman’s daughter?”
Martin half opened his eyes. I think he saw the gleam of my pistol, which, though still in my hand, I had no intention of using. A convulsive look of terror passed over his face as he muttered thickly,—
“Take that thing away, for mercy’s sake, and you shall know all. We took her and Biddy to the priest’s at Killurin; but Father Murphy would have nothing to say to us. We didn’t know what to do. So we—we—we—ah, Lord, forgive all.”
There was a painful pause. For a moment I thought his secret would die with him. Then he murmured, pointing to the ceiling with his thumb, “We brought her here!”
“What?” I cried in amazement; “Miss Kit is in this house now?”
Martin raised himself with difficulty on his elbow, fumbled feebly in his belt, and handed me a rusty key. Before I could seize it he fell back on the floor, and I had to take the key from his dead hand.
In the midst of my woe a wild throb of joy shot through me as I realised what this unlooked-for news meant.