On the night mentioned in the letter, Blake and Jones, accompanied by a police sergeant and two constables, left Ballybor Barracks in a car after dark in the opposite direction to that in which the village of Lissamore lay, and after going about three miles turned off at a byroad and proceeded by unfrequented roads, until they reached a small wood about half a mile from Hegarty’s house on the Castleport road; here they blocked the road with the car, and waited for their victim.
There was bright starlight, and punctually at 9.45 they saw a cyclist approaching from the direction of Castleport; but so dark was it in the wood that the cyclist only avoided running into the car by throwing himself off, to be quickly seized by two stalwart policemen before he could let go of his handle-bars, gagged and well tied up. They then took him into the wood, removed his uniform, dressed him in an old police uniform, and finally deposited him at the bottom of the car.
Jones then put on the Volunteer officer’s uniform, took his bicycle, and rode on to Hegarty’s house, while the police backed the car up a bohereen and waited there. Before starting out they had arranged that Jones should camouflage his English voice by a Yankee twang, as a brogue was quite beyond his powers.
On arriving at Hegarty’s house, Jones leant his bicycle against the wall, and gave three mysterious knocks at the door. For quite two minutes there was no answer, and just as he was preparing to knock again, the door opened about three inches, and a girl’s voice asked in a whisper who was there, and what he wanted at that time of night.
Now, unfortunately, the letter had not given the name of the I.R.A. officer, so Jones, being afraid to give a name lest the Hegartys might know the officer’s real name, muttered that he was a republican officer, and had come to see Pat Hegarty. The door at once closed, and he could hear the girl open and close a door at the back of the house, and for fully ten minutes nothing further occurred.
This was not part of the play which Jones and Blake had carefully rehearsed in the barracks that afternoon, and Jones was quite nonplussed what to do next. Being young and impetuous, he was just on the point of ruining the whole show by breaking in the door, when it opened and the girl’s voice told him to come in.
The room was pitch dark, and for a second Jones hesitated; but the girl laid her hand on his sleeve, and led him through to a lighted room at the back, where he found Hegarty with his wife and son about to sit down to supper. Hegarty bade him welcome, and the meal started.
After they had eaten for some time in silence, Hegarty asked him several questions about where he had been recently, and of prominent Volunteers in other parts of the country. Jones made the best answers he could, not forgetting to keep up his American accent, and mentioned casually that he had only recently come over from the States, where his parents had been living for some years.
For a time there was silence again, but Jones could feel that the eyes of Maria Hegarty were on him all the time; and presently she began to ask most awkward questions about places and people in the States, and Jones was hard put to it to avoid suspicion. Luckily Maria mentioned that her friends lived in the Eastern States, so that it was easy for Jones’s people to live far away in the west, and the situation was saved.
Supper over, the women cleared the table and retired, while Hegarty produced a large jar of poteen and tumblers, and the three men settled themselves round the fire to drink and talk. For the next two hours Jones extracted all the information he could out of the Hegartys, who, though shy at first, warmed up after several glasses of poteen, and Jones learnt from young Hegarty that the arms were kept under the floors of a disused Protestant school-house in the rectory grounds at Cloonalla, the rector of which was a notorious Loyalist, and would have died sooner than conceal arms knowingly for the rebels.