t he left his house an Englishman came out
of the Railway Hotel. He also had a gun over his shoulder, and he took
the upper road. These two men, who were to meet for the first time that
day, were destined to decide the fate of the world between them.

As John Castellan walked past the ruined distillery, which overlooks the
beach on which the fishing boats are drawn up, he saw a couple of duck
flying seaward. He quickened his pace, and walked on until he turned the
bend of the road, at which on the right-hand side a path leads up to a
gate in the old wall, which still guards the ragged domains of Clifden
Castle. A few hundred yards away there is a little peninsula, on which
stands a house built somewhat in bungalow fashion. The curve of the
peninsula turns to the eastward, and makes a tiny bay of almost crescent
shape. In this the pair of duck settled.

John Castellan picked up a stone from the road, and threw it into the
water. As the birds rose his gun went up. His right barrel banged and
the duck fell. The drake flew landward: he fired his left barrel and
missed. Then came a bang from the upper road, and the drake dropped.
The Englishman had killed it with a wire cartridge in his choked left
barrel.

"I wonder who the devil did that!" said Castellan, as he saw the bird
fall. "It was eighty yards if it was an inch, and that's a good gun with
a good man behind it."

The Englishman left the road to pick up the bird and then went down the
steep, stony hillside towards the shore of the silver-mouthed bay in the
hope of getting another shot farther on, for the birds were now
beginning to come over; and so it came about that he and the Irishman
met within a few yards of each other, one on either side of a low spit
of sand and shingle.

"That was a fine shot you killed the drake with," said the Irishman,
looking at the bird he was carrying by the legs in his left hand.

"A good gun, and a wire cartridge, I fancy, were mainly responsible for
his death," laughed the Englishman. "See you've got the other."

"Yes, and missed yours," said the Irishman.

The other recognised the tone as that of a man to whom failure, even in
the most insignificant matter, was hateful, and he saw a quick gleam in
his eyes which he remembered afterwards under very different
circumstances.

But it so happened that the rivalry between them which was hereafter to
have such momentous consequences was to be manifested there and then in
a fashio