“And the cattle, sir? would we get protection for the cattle? They’d be murdered else entirely.”
“Of course,” said Mr. Tener, “the police would endeavour to protect the cattle.”
Then, turning to me, he said, “That is a very reasonable question. These scoundrels, when they are afraid to tackle the men put under their ban, go about at night, and mutilate and torture and kill the poor beasts. I remember a case,” he went on, “in Roscommon, where several head of cattle mysteriously disappeared. They could be found nowhere. No trace of them could be got. But long weeks after they vanished, some lads in a field several miles away saw numbers of crows hovering over a particular point. They went there, and there at the bottom of an abandoned coal-shaft lay the shattered remains of these lost cattle. The poor beasts had been driven blindfold over the fields and down into this pit, where, with broken limbs, and maimed, they all miserably died of hunger.”
“Yes,” said one of the tenants, “and our cattle’d be driven into the Shannon, and drownded, and washed away.”
“You must understand,” interposed Mr. Tener “that when cattle are thus maliciously destroyed the owners can recover nothing unless the remains of the poor beasts are found and identified within three days.”
The disgust which I felt and expressed at these revelations seemed to encourage the tenants. One of them said that before the evictions came off certain of the National Leaguers visited him, and told him he must resist the officers. “I consulted my sister,” he said, “and she said, ‘Don’t you be such a fool as to be doing that; we’ll all be ruined entirely by those rascals and rogues of the League.’ And I didn’t resist. But only the other day I went to a priest in the trouble we are in, and what do you think he said to me? He said, ‘Why didn’t you do as you were bid? then you would be helped,’ and he would do nothing for us! Would you think that right, sir, in your country?”
“I should think in my country,” I replied, “that a priest who behaved in that way ought to be unfrocked.”
“Did you pay over all your rent into the hands of the trustees of the League?” I asked of one of these tenants.
“I paid over money to them, sir,” he replied.
“Yes,” I said, “but did you pay over all the amount of the rent, or how much of it?”