was Pat
Carroll, and his brother Terry, and Tim Brady. They were up there
just where the lane has turned down from the steamboat road. I had
gone down to the big sluice gates before anyone had noticed me, and
there were Tim and Terry smashing away at the gate hinges, up to
their middles in mud; and Pat Carroll was handing them down a big
crowbar. Terry, when he saw me, fell flat forward into the water, and
had to be picked out again."

"Did they say anything to threaten you?" said the Captain.

"Tim Brady said that I was all right, and was a great friend of
Father Brosnan's. Then they whispered together, and I heard Terry say
that he wouldn't go against anything that Father Brosnan might say.
Then Pat Carroll came and stood over me with the crowbar."

"Did he threaten you?"

"He didn't do it in a threatening way; but only asked me to be hand
and glove with them."

"Had you been intimate with this man before? asked the Captain.

"He had been very intimate with him," said the father. "All this
calamity has come of his intimacy. He has changed his religion and
ceased to be a gentleman." Here the boy again sobbed, but Edith still
squeezed his hand.

"What did you say?" asked the Captain, "when he bade you be hand and
glove with him?"

"I said that I would. Then they made the sign of a cross, and swore
me on it. And they swore me specially to say nothing up here. And
they swore me again when they met down at Tim Rafferty's house in
Headford. I intended to keep my word, and I think that you ought to
have let me keep it."

"But there were three others whom you saw," urged the Captain.

"There was Con Heffernan, and a man they call Lax, who had come from
Lough Conn beyond Castlebar."

"He's not a man of this county."

"I think not, though I had seen him here before. He has had something
to do with the Landleaguers up about Foxford."

"I think I have a speaking acquaintance with that Mr. Lax," said the
Captain; and everybody could perceive that the tone of his voice was
altered as he spoke about Mr. Lax. "And who was the sixth?"

"There was that old man, papa, whom they call Terry. But he wasn't
doing anything in particular."

"He is the greatest blackguard on the estate," said the father.

"But we will confine ourselves to the five," said the Captain, "not
forgetting Mr. Lax. What was Mr. Lax doing?"

"I can't remember what they were all doing. How is a fellow to
remember them all? There were those two a