The Dispossessed

Book 620: Murder Room

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Historical Fiction; Mystery; Historical Mysteries; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

Ireland, 1651. A country ravaged by Oliver Cromwell's Act of Settlement. Under it, Fergal O'Breslin, a young clan chief, and his fellow Irish citizens are forced to leave their ancestral lands and travel to the cramped, rocky province of Connacht. There, honest men become robbers, proud men must beg, and despair and privation become a way of life. Set against a panoramic backdrop of religious and political upheaval, Fergal and his clansmen struggle to wrest an existence out of a barren and inhospitable land under the yoke of English oppression.

Release date: November 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

“Necessity is the last and strongest weapon.”

—PROVERB

The Aran Islands,

Ireland

1651

IN THE DARK lifted only a little by the star-reflection of a moonless night, the Atlantic looked very cold and very black and lonely. And here on the
narrow strip of rough beach, they felt very lonely themselves, two desperate men alone in the dark.

Roy Donlevy put a hand to his kilt-buckle. “Damn, it’s cold,” he muttered. “A sea kicking up, Fergal. Will we make it, five miles of it?”

Fergal O’Breslin was stripping off his clothes for the third time tonight. “You might live another week if you wait nice and dry for the garrison to fall and the Parliament men to
find you. Get on, Roy.”

“Little choice,” agreed Donlevy. They had dressed again after their second swim, and their cautious haste across the little isle of Inisheer had set the blood flowing again, wet as
they were; with the icy March wind on them, here on an exposed Atlantic coast, it set the teeth chattering even to think of the water waiting.

Not many folk lived on these west isles of Aran, best times. They were not big islands where a man might lose himself; and this night they held too many English Parliament soldiers for comfort,
reinforcements at last come up to take the garrison at Kilronan on Inishmore, that held one of the last handfuls of Federation men holding out, even after the treaty signed last summer. They had
had no news in four months; they might be the last garrison to hold out in Ireland. And they would not hold long now. They’d been supplied by the fisherfolk to now, but that could not last,
with the size of the occupying English force as it must be through Ireland.

“In fact, I’m surprised,” said Donlevy, rolling his clothes in a bundle, “we’re not leading a procession in last-minute escape.”

“And so we likely are, an hour or a day behind us. Hold your loose tongue and come along.” Fergal had no taste for badinage at the moment—not with his uncle back there in the
garrison and likely dead by tomorrow or next week, and the long road before him, and God knew what at the end of it. He stepped down to the water and the cold of it hit him like a blow; he
suppressed a gasp. “Roy,” he said, “do you feel you can make it? You’re not as strong a swimmer as myself.”

“I am still with you.” They had slid away off Inishmore seven hours ago, by first dusk, and swum round the island, and made the mile swim in the dark to the middle island of
Inishmaan; got safe across that island, and swum a harder, longer mile and a half on to Inisheer, past the dark rocks jutting up out of the sea, and they had walked across the rough, rocky, barren
land to here. Out there across five, maybe six miles of deep, surging, fast-running channel sea, there lay the mainland coast of Clare—and a chance for life.

“If either of us weakens,” said Fergal, “the other must go on. No sense dying for nothing together when one could get off. There’s time—it can’t be much past
midnight—and the tide is running. If you weaken, turn and float for a bit to rest. If we’re separated, which is likely, don’t hang about the shore hunting.”

“I’ve some sense,” said Donlevy mildly. “Where could we arrange to meet?”

“We’ll need to give Galway city a wide berth, but no sense going north straight up through Roscommon and Leitrim. They’re less likely, please God, to have patrols out in wilder
territory along the coast. And, please God, the tide will take us above the Parliament camp opposite us here. Get round Galway and go west, by way of Mayo and Sligo. Listen, boy. If we’re
separated, make up the River Clare to bypass Tuam. There’s one place there they wouldn’t be, nor any Irishman either, maybe to take note and suspect—one place we could lie and
wait a day or two. Knockmagh.”

“Knockmagh—Christ, then,” said Donlevy, only half-humorous. “What to choose between the hordes of the Danaan-Sidhe and Parliament men? Do I believe in the Sidhe, these
powerful fairy-folk?—of course not, no sensible Christian man does—but all the same, there are places I’d rather spend a night than on top of the hill belonging to the King of the
Sidhe.”

“For Christ’s love!” said Fergal. “That is the place. Give ourselves a week to get there—call it sixty miles, roundabout as we’ll need to go. If we separate,
I’ll meet you on Knockmagh a week today. Don’t wait above a full day there.”

“Agreed,” said Donlevy. “If we don’t meet, Fergal, you will carry my love to Shevaun and look to our boy.”

“I will do that. And if I drop out by the way, you will carry the news to the family, that the clan will need to elect a new chief.”

“I daresay we are making excuses to put off getting to it,” remarked Donlevy.

“Very likely.” Fergal slung his bundle of clothes round his shoulders by his belt, and stepped out to the strong cold surge of water round his thighs. “I’ll see you on
shore or at Knockmagh in a week, and God’s luck with you, Roy.” He scarcely heard Donlevy’s wish for luck; the tide pulled at him, and the surf on rocks was loud. He let himself
down to deep water and began to swim steadily, not trying for speed, only keeping his direction as best he could. The coast of Clare lay almost due east, but he did not care within reason where he
came ashore, so it wasn’t right up in Galway Bay. There was a Parliament camp somewhere on the shore over there, waiting cat at mousehole for the defenders to give up the Arans and run. The
tide ran like a race in this narrow channel, a roar and a white thunder, running strong northeast, and he knew he might be carried north from the islands. That did not matter, it was all to the
good, so he could make headway east across the tide toward land.

He had been nervous about this swim, but now he was at it—and afterward—it was a curious interval of peace between times of stress and fear and danger. His responsibility was simple;
his arms and legs moved automatically, without conscious direction; and his mind was quite free, for the first and last time in a long while. Time slipped away from him too. For an unspecified time
he heard Donlevy nearby, and then the tide separated them. It was either eternity or a few heartbeats he had been in the cold water, swimming cross-tide; he did not know or care.

He had time for some queer, dreamlike thoughts as he swam. One of them was that if there had not been a queen named Elizabeth on England’s throne up to half a century ago, likely this
Fergal O’Breslin would not be here at all, out in deep water on the nighttide—for another Fergal O’Breslin would not, probably, have been a swimmer—or for that matter an
O’Breslin. For Fergal O’Breslin’s great-grandsire had been one Rory McGuinness of Antrim, not an unimportant man either, once personal guard to the great prince Shane
O’Neill, and given the Antrim land for service. But with Hugh Gavelock O’Neill and the O’Donnells broken at Kinsale, fifty years ago, and fled to Spain, and the power of the Scot
MacDonnells broken in Antrim, Elizabeth’s English came into Ulster—east and west of the Bann they came, confiscating land and driving out the legal owners or holding them as
tenant-farmers. The sons of McGuinness left alive went into exile with the chiefs of Ulster, but his youngest daughter Etain was wed to one of the O’Donnells of Tyrconnell; and her daughter
Ethne was wed later to an O’Breslin of the chief’s line. So Fergal O’Breslin did not grow up inland, in fertile Antrim or Tyrone, but along the Bay of Donegal, to be familiar with
the fishers and their boats and the cold deep North Atlantic.

The house by Lough Eask, and his mother’s anxious eyes, and the clatter of horses in the courtyard—that morning they rode away—three and a half years ago . . . The sun so
bright on blue water.

And he had time, there, drifting and swimming, to worry. They had defended their retreat west, last April to November, before Henry Cromwell’s Parliament men, even as the few weak leaders
left to the Irish Royalists—after the O’Neills were gone, Eoghan Ruadh by death and that younger Hugh by defeat and flight—were making surrender-treaty. Under McGeraghty and
O’Connor they had held the garrisons of Clare, and been driven back and back, to end in siege on the Arans—a siege that could have only one end, and it soon to come. McGeraghty had seen
that clear—a hard man of common sense, that old chief.

It passed through Fergal’s mind slow and sharp again, the old chief speaking straight to the point, almost emotionless. “We cannot last much longer, and there is less than sense in
not making a gamble for freedom—whatever freedom may be left outside, for native Irish. But there is another thing to think of too—”

And Cathal O’Breslin saying, “How many of us could get off, boats or no? If that message got through from O’Fallon was right, the war ended nine months back, official, and only
remote forts are holding out, like ourselves. The Parliament will have troops to spare to send after us—these reinforcements coming in now—”

“I am ahead of you, Cathal,” McGeraghty had said. “Maybe it is the death-premonition on me that makes me see clear. It comes to me that for what has happened this hundred
years, and what might come in the next hundred years, we cannot any of us think for ourselves as individual men—we will need to think for our race and our nation, to preserve them alive as we
can. Remember what they did at Drogheda and Wicklow and Wexford, at New Ross and through Meath, a hundred other places. The bloodlust is on them, and they would kill us to a man.”

“To women and infants!” put in O’Connor with soft venom. “I was at Drogheda. I know it. And we know what they have done since.”

McGeraghty said tiredly, “We cannot know what destruction they will make after this surrender, what punishments they will invent. They have killed enough of us as it is, but they will not
be satisfied. We must above all think and act for our country and people as a unit, not like savages man for man. And one importance, it is the young men. We must keep the young men alive to carry
on the breed and the fight. I do not know how they may get out, from the rest of us here—but those are my orders. The young men are all free to go, as they may, in honor—and the rest of
us must hold the garrison until they are away, if possible.”

It was like a miniature painting, seen in the mind’s eye: that gray old badger of the chief McGeraghty, the men about him talking sharp and quick there in the council-room of the
fortress—O’Connor, and O’Brien, and Rijordan, and Cathal O’Breslin—with his nephew behind him maybe only because he happened to be chief of the clan, if not as
experienced in war at only twenty-three. And O’Brien with his vulpine face twisted in a sneer, saying, “Fine talk, fine talk! And the rest of us caught here to be taken and hanged in a
row off the cliff maybe! I say, every man for himself is the only way—”

“To sue for peace and surrender now?” said O’Connor. “Is that what you say, man? Then none will get out alive.”

Cathal O’Breslin turned a contemptuous grin. “Oh, well, then,” he said, “we all know O’Briens, do we not? They are famous—for this and that. There have been
poets made verses about it in the past.” And he quoted, still smiling:

“The race of the O’Brien of Banbha under Murrough,

Their covenant is with the King of England.

They have turned their backs, and sad is the deed

To the inheritance of their fathers.

Alas for the foreign gray gun!

Alas for the yellow chains!”

O’Brien turned on him savagely. “Hell’s name, waste time mouthing the silly scribblings of some bard dead these two centuries! There is a black sheep here and
there in every family—”

“Enough!” said McGeraghty. “It is the last folly to quarrel among ourselves. I have said how it will be—all of us with grown sons will stay, the young men are free to try
escape however they want.”

And how many ways to escape off an island? Fergal had not considered a boat at all. There was an enemy camp on Inishmore, with reinforcements expected, and boats were the first thing an enemy
would look for. . . . It had been a long swim even in shallow water, from the seaward wall of the fort round Inishmore to the shore facing the middle island—but it had seemed to him the best
way, and to Donlevy too. And they had come this far at least. He wondered if many others had tried a plan of escape, or were trying it tonight or tomorrow—or if most would rely on hope of
honorable quarter. From English!

Now he began to be aware of deadly weariness, the intolerable ache in his shoulder-muscles and thighs, and the numbness possessing his whole body for the terrible ice-chill of the March sea. He
had no idea how long he had been in the water, how far he might have come. He strained to hear surf on shore or rock, but the wind was high. Three hours or three minutes since he had last been
conscious of Donlevy near him somewhere? He could not swim farther; he turned and let the tide take him, resting. The tide bore him, presently, a heavy blow against something—rock—one
of the many standing up out of this channel. He clung to it and rested a moment, gasping, as lapping waves flung spray off it into his eyes. He never remembered being so dead tired or so
cold—not even after the fight at Athlone—God grant he was not far off now—

The nightmare conviction seized him, as he half-lay there clutching the rough granite, the strength draining out of him, that he had lost all direction, been carried back round Inisheer and out
to open sea. Nothing to guide him—no light on land—and his vision of the stars was blurred by wet and exhaustion. Rocks all round these islands, seaward as well as landward . . . And
then the wind died, and for just a breath he heard it—he thought he heard it—the blessed sound of surf on a beach, not breaking on cliff or rock. He drew a long breath, kicked the rock
for momentum, and began to swim again in that direction.

But he tired more quickly now, even after the little rest, and awhile later he was thinking he must turn and float with the tide again, to recover a little strength, when he pitched headlong
with bottom under him, a sudden shelf with white surf slapping it. Thank God, thank God—he had made it—had he? Was this the mainland? He staggered to his feet in knee-deep water, almost
fell, and pulled himself up from the surf. Once he was out of the water he began to shake violently with the cold. He went on walking straight ahead, slowly, knowing he must not let himself stop
and lie down, or he’d die of the cold. There would be cliffs here, if it was the mainland—a very narrow strip of beach—yes—the ground rose sharp under him, and he found
himself fighting his way up a steep slope, up and up, gasping for breath, not daring to stop or he’d fall— When he got to solid level ground, at what he prayed was the cliff-top, he had
to fling himself down exhausted, and regain breath.

The way the tide ran, it might have taken him fifteen miles north for the five miles he’d made east, and that would put him somewhere around Black Head, where the coast turned east to
border Galway Bay. No villages he remembered near the headland, all wild there. But there might be army camps anywhere, these days. He ran into a tree in the dark, sidestepped it; the next minute
the darkness suddenly turned even darker and he felt that he had come into a wood. Good!— He blundered about, going down on hands and knees to feel the ground, and eventually as he’d
hoped felt good thick dry bracken. With trees the size of these, growing close, the dead undergrowth was kept fairly dry even in winter, and there was a deal of it. Fergal unslung the bundle of
clothes from his back, separated kilt, tunic, cloak, and sandals, and burrowed as deep as he could under the bracken, carrying the clothes with him and spreading them out on his body, pulling
bracken up over him, heaping it on each side. When he had squirmed about and felt a little warmth begin to generate in him, he lay quiet, keeping a good hold on his belt-dagger, willing his body to
stop shaking.

Dawn couldn’t be far off. Scout round as soon as light showed, find more or less where he was, with luck pick up some food somehow, and make east to circle Galway town that was in English
hands. Maybe only forty miles up to Knoekmagh, straight, but likely almost double that the way he’d need to go, roundabout.

He wondered if Donlevy had got to shore somewhere, and spared an already-sleepy prayer for him. Break his sister Shevaun’s heart it would if Roy did not come home. . . . But was Shevaun
safe herself?—and their mother, and the boy—the baby neither Roy nor he had ever seen? He stirred uneasily in the bracken. No telling what had gone on since the official surrender.

He wondered how long it would take him to get home—with or without Roy. A week up to Knoekmagh, and then another sixty, seventy miles up to Donegal and the house by Lough Eask . . . In the
nine months since surrender, what had Oliver Cromwell’s army done in Ireland?

A Federation, well, it had been less than that. Ormonde the duke, that Anglo-Irish Butler who hated Catholicism as hard as any Puritan, gathering a Royalist force here to
support the Stuarts against Parliament. No Gael of the old blood, the men who had kept to the old laws and ways and dress, had joined those Anglo-Irish lords in federation out of love for the first
Charles Stuart or the one now in exile. No; in these last fifty years, the religious discrimination making new laws bore hard on Catholics here, and Charles Stuart had been son of a French Catholic
mother. Only one thing to be said of the present Stuart; he was King of England but he was not an Englishman. If he could be put in power, and partly by Irish Catholic support, the chance was good
that he would see the laws relaxed and greater justice done.

And that was the only reason those old war-hounds Eoghan Ruadh and Hugh O’Neill, and all the Gael-Irish chiefs in the north and west, had joined the Royalists against Parliament, back in
’44, in support of the first Charles. Strange bedfellows; those Norman-Irish lords and landholders looking down their noses at the Gaels, and the compliment returned with interest. Which was
not to condemn all Norman-Irish; there were Fitzmaurices, Fitzgeralds, Burkes and Joyces and Lynches, truer Irish patriots than others wearing originally Gaelic names.

But it wasn’t only an English army they fought; some of the men with the Federation Royalists were Englishmen. It was Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan army, that iron general who had won
Parliament’s war against the Crown, and every man in it with the bloodlust raised in him by lies told and fervent sermons preached against the bloodthirsty Catholic Irish. . . . Lies told
mostly about the patriots’ rising of 1641, that abortive little war that in the end had got inextricably mixed—in principle—with the Civil War in England . . . Two counts, there
were, about their bloodlust: and maybe the historians would say the religious difference was the stronger issue. But there wasn’t much to choose between—Protestant distrust and Puritan
hatred of Papism, and the perennial English race-arrogance, all other men naturally inferior and all Irish doubly so.

Well, it had been a fight; and, thought Fergal savagely, the Gael-Irish had done most of the fighting: the Royalist English and Anglo-Irish forces were small and ill-equipped. Had it not been a
fight, against that inhuman New Model army of the iron general who had killed a king! The numbers, the guns, the horse, the supply, all had been on the Parliament side—and Providence favored
numbers; but, by Christ, they knew they had been in a fight—that they did!

And now—and now? A treaty had been signed; and the O’Neills were dead or escaped to exile; the last rebellion in the name of the Stuart was put down—unless those vacillating
Scots should decide to fight; and Cromwell’s party in unchallenged power. And what would that mean to Ireland? Or for that matter, to England?

Fergal O’Breslin was new young chief of a minor Tyrconnell clan when he went out with his uncle Cathal and his brother Aidan three and a half years ago. He was guardian and trustee, as
chief, of fifteen thousand acres of O’Breslin land in south Tyrconnell, and owner of a house on Lough Eask and a thousand acres in his own name, of his private holding. His brother and heir
was dead at New Ross, at nineteen; the two hundred troopmen he had led into the fight were dead or scattered; his uncle and prospective heir—since he was the only surviving son of his
father—was trapped on Inishmore and likely would be dead soon; and he lay alone here, a man on the run, with his clothes and his belt-knife, not even a hand-gun. A hundred miles off was his
last responsibility, his lady-mother, widowed five years, and his sister Shevaun and her son—also the responsibility of her husband, Roy Donlevy, but what guarantee that Roy was still
alive?

That was a strong tide and deep water between Inisheer and Clare, and Fergal knew he was lucky to be on land—and lucky twice not to have run into a Parliament camp on shore.

At the first hint of light in the sky, he crawled out of the bracken, stiff and still cold and desperately hungry. He donned the stiff-dried clothes, and went northeast through
the wood. Now in this winter season the dawn came silent and dispirited, no outburst of birdsong to herald the light; and he knew it was only because it was winter, but unreasonably it seemed that
a chill lay over the whole land, a silent agony of expectancy, for final defeat.

He came to the edge of the wood; a strip of barren land went down to sloping rocky cliff and a great expanse of water. Galway Bay, by the sun. He turned due east and walked on through the
wood-edge. There was a ship near shore out there, tacking lazy northeast up toward Galway harbor, and she was a big English forty-gunner, a troop-carrier very likely. Fergal watched her awhile,
moving cautious in shelter of trees.

He smelled the army-camp before he heard it, and a little horrid nausea came up in him, of hunger doubled for the smell of cooking—something anonymous, emergency-rations likely, only
flavored with jerked meat, but something edible. A minute later he heard men talking, and the sounds of utensils clattering; he went from tree to tree, wary as if he stalked game—only here he
was the game—and past thin growth, into a clearing, a couple of hundred feet on, he caught a glimpse of men.

A Parliament camp. The sanitary trenches wouldn’t be far off—somewhere beyond the cooks’ domain. He dropped flat on the ground, inching up behind a great thornbush, and lay
quiet, listening. Easy enough to circle the camp, but Christ knew he was hungered, and he’d make better time with a full stomach.

A man was singing robustly to himself not far away. Fergal knew the tune, an English tune and for all that a good one. “The London Apprentice,” it was.

“When I was apprenticed in London, I went to see my dear—

The candles were all burning, the moon shone bright and clear!

I knocked upon her window, to ease her of her pain—

She rose to let me in, then she barred the door again.

“I like your well behavior, and thus I always say—

I cannot rest contented whilst you are far away!

The roads they are so muddy, we cannot gang about—

So roll me in your arms, love, and blow the candles out!”

What a devil of a fellow it was, singing love songs at the crack of dawn! Fergal grinned tightly to himself under the thornbush. Another man came up and said something about
fifteen minutes’ grace afore the men formed line. The cook had a bad temper like all good cooks, and swore.

“At least ’tisn’t raining agen. ’Ere, what you got for us there, Gideon?—do smell almighty good!” Fergal’s nose twitched in agreement. He reared up
quietly and peered through the thorn branches.

The cooks’ fires were started on beds of piled stones, in a row, ten feet off; there were eight or ten cauldrons simmering, and fifteen, twenty men standing about—cooks and their
helpers. A smallish camp then, up the slope beyond, invisible from here—say five hundred men. Well, it didn’t look very practicable, but by God he’d do his damndest to sample what
was in that nearest cauldron!

“Ere, Gideon, for God’s love lemme ’ave a taste now! I’m that empty you can ’ear me rumble arf-a-mile orf. I got me bowl, see. ’Tisn’t fi’ minnits
aforehand, friend—”

“Ger orf, greedy-guts! ’Nother ten pound on ye ’n’ ye ’on’t keep up on slow march! Ah, t’ get rid o’ ye—” The cook ladled out,
ungracious. “’N’ don’t I know you’ll go orf private ’n’ gollop that dahn, ’n’ come back t’ end o’ line for nother dish from
some’un else! Ye’re a damned hog, Jase Bone!” Fergal held a branch aside with infinite caution: big stout fellow, clutching a bowl, already turning from the fire, deigning no
answer to the cook but scuttling in this direction, true to the prophecy.

Fergal watched him pass, five feet off, and crawled after him until he dared stand up. The greedy one hadn’t gone far; he sat on a raised knoll under a spreading oak, and he hadn’t
lifted his spoon before Fergal was on him. It was a damned foolhardy thing to do maybe, with that camp of soldiers so near. He came on him from behind, and took due care not to upset the
bowl—got an arm crooked about the fat man’s throat, groped for the bowl and set it aside out of harm’s way, and slid the dagger-blade in nice and easy. The man gave a loud gasp
and went limp.

Fergal took the bowl and spoon on another hundred yards, starting to circle the camp, before he sat to eat. There were only a couple of lumps of dried beef in the stuff, but it put new heart in
him. Damned foolhardy, yes: likely the man would be found before long, dead or wounded—he hadn’t stopped to see—but at that, any straying Englishman was apt to get knifed in an
Irish wood, they wouldn’t be too astonished or alarmed at that. . . . And anyway he had his breakfast, be damned to what might come!

All along the way he’d looked for Roy, but there’d been no sign. Damn, had he ever got to shore? No way he could know; all he could do was go on, and wait next week at Knockmagh.

And he wondered if that forty-gunner in the bay had maybe picked up other men trying for escape off Inishmore, last night.

He got round the English camp by late morning, careful in wood, crawling in open, maybe ten miles’ circle. There was a village near here, he remembered that—a place called
Ballyvaughan: all too likely there were more troops quartered there, and he’d need to circle it, going out of his way south.

At the moment he thought that, he was at the edge of the wood, with now and again a glimpse of the bay on his left, a mile away; the wood got deeper south of him, to his right, and he thought
he’d be wise to turn, for if his memory was accurate that village couldn’t be far off. And then he froze, listening, a hand reaching to his knife.

Crashing of footsteps ahead, through brush. Ahead. Then, not after him—or were they? Men’s voices shouting in English—This way! There they go—after
’em!

A man burst out past thornbushes ahead of Fergal, cannoned blindly into a tree, changed direction and blundered on. A second man came after, a stout man gasping and red and winded. Men in brown
robes, awkward for running. Fergal dodged behind a tree; the pursuit sounded close.

The first man was running in circles, blind, in panic. He made enough noise for four men, and here he came again, straight for Fergal like a target, and ran into him, and opened his mouth to
yell. Fergal took him by the throat with one hand and laid the other across his mouth.

“My pardon, brother,” he whispered, “but no noise! Get up the tree with you now—”

The man in the brown robe stared up at him dazed, gibbering, stone-white with terror. “What say you?—an Irishman you are—the tree—”

“For the love of God!” said Fergal. “Get up! Men don’t look above their heads, usual way.” He set foot in the crotch and got a handhold, pulled the man after him.
The robed man was clutching a great cloth-wrapped bundle, and would not let go of it; he muttered incoherently to himself. He was not a very young man, and likely he’d never climbed a tree
since a faraway boyhood, and he clung to his bundle obstinate, only one hand free; Fergal hauled him upward grimly, thanking Christ it was an easy oak with spreading branches. Bare now, too, but
the trees grew close here; if they were utterly still, the pursuit would run by and never look up.

“Quiet!” he said fiercely. “Quiet for your life, man!”

“They must not—I must save it—my life, yes, nought at all—if I can but preserve it—”

“Quiet!” said Fergal, and steadied them both in the narrow crotch thirty feet up in the old oak.

THE BROWN-ROBED MAN had the wider place, a division of trunk and branch like a saddle; he scarce needed Fergal’s firm hand pressing him