It was late when they started back for Castleport, and Blake, who was suspicious of an ambush at the bridge in the ravine, which was the nearest point on the road to the Maryburgh country, ordered Black to go ahead with two Crossleys, and to search the ravine thoroughly, and then to wait until the rest of the force caught him up.
Blake’s party was delayed by two punctures, and when they got near to the ravine heavy firing suddenly broke out ahead of them. When within half a mile of the bridge, they saw a party of men running away from a culvert in a dip of the road ahead of them.
Luckily, Blake was in the leading car, and ordered the driver to pull up about a hundred yards short of the culvert, which, sure enough, went up before they had been waiting two minutes.
The firing ahead had now grown heavier, and every now and then the dull thud of a bursting Mills bomb could be heard above the racket of musketry. Realising that Black must be hard pressed, Blake divided his force into two, ordered each party to deploy on one side of the road and attempt to outflank the ravines.
When within three hundred yards of the bridge both parties came under heavy enfilade machine-gun fire—machine-guns which made a noise none had ever heard before, and were probably American Thompson guns,—and they were forced to take the best cover they could find in the open bog.
The machine-gun fire at once died down, only to break out again every time the police attempted to advance by short rushes. By painful degrees they managed to get within eighty yards of the bridge, where the formation of the ground protected them from that horrible enfilade hail of bullets, and gathering themselves together they charged at the reverse slope of the ravine.
At once the firing ceased, and when at last they had torn their way through briars and gorse to reach the top, all that they found was small piles of empty cartridges and two ordinary tweed caps—not a sign of a gunman whichever way they looked.
They then turned their attention to their comrades on the road, and here a heartrending sight met their eyes. At first it appeared as though all the occupants of the two cars were either dead or wounded, but as they descended towards the bridge a small party of police crawled from underneath it, soaked to the skin. They found Black lying against the front wheel of the leading car with four bullet wounds in his body and his head smashed in by a dum-dum bullet—stone-dead.
Blake found out from the survivors that Black had disregarded his orders, and had not pulled up until the cars had passed the bridge, when a hail of bullets swept the cars from the top of both banks of the ravine. Black was wounded by the first volley, was hit twice while getting out of the car to lead his men to the attack, and in the head as his foot touched the ground.
The sun had by now gone down, and collecting all his wounded and dead, Blake pushed off for Castleport as fast as he could.