illars, which stood
gateless beside the road. Colonel John got to his saddle, and they
trotted on. Notwithstanding which it was late in the afternoon when
they approached the town of Tralee.

In those days it was a town much ruined. The grim castle of the
Desmonds, scene of the midnight murder which had brought so many woes
on Ireland, still elbowed the grey Templars Cloister, and looked down,
as it frowned across the bay, on the crumbling aisles and squalid
graves of the Abbey. To Bale, as he scanned the dark pile, it was but a
keep--a mere nothing beside Marienburg or Stettin--rising above the
hovels of an Irish town. But to the Irishman it stood for many a bitter
memory and many a crime, besides that murder of a guest which will
never be forgotten. The Colonel sighed as he gazed.

Presently his eyes dropped to the mean houses which flanked the
entrance to the town; and he recognised that if all the saints had not
vouchsafed their company, the delay caused by the meeting with the
priest had done somewhat. For at that precise moment a man was riding
into the town before them, and the horse under the man was Flavia
McMurrough's lost mare.

Colonel John's eye lightened as he recognised its points. With a sign
to Bale he fell in behind the man and followed him through two or three
ill-paved and squalid streets. Presently the rider passed through a
loop-holed gateway, before which a soldier was doing sentry-go. The two
followed. Thence the quarry crossed an open space surrounded by dreary
buildings which no military eye could take for aught but a barrack
yard. The two still followed--the sentry staring after them. On the far
side of the yard the mare and its rider vanished through a second
archway, which appeared to lead to an inner court. The Colonel, nothing
intimidated, went after them. Fortune, he thought, had favoured him.

But as he emerged from the tunnel-like passage he raised his head in
astonishment. A din of voices, an outbreak of laughter and revelry,
burst in a flood of sound upon his ears. He turned his face in the
direction whence the sounds came, and saw three open windows, and at
each window three or four flushed countenances. His sudden emergence
from the tunnel, perhaps his look of surprise, wrought an instant's
silence, which was followed by a ruder outburst.

"Cock! cock! cock!" shrieked a tipsy voice, and an orange, hurled at
random, missed the Colonel's astonished face by a yard. The mare which