support anything so heavy as a policeman. But here again he was
immediately fortunate, yet ultimately unfortunate, for it is said
that one of the men was drowned, leaving a family feud which made a
little rift in his popularity. These stories can now be told in some
detail, not because they are the most marvelous of his many
adventures, but because these alone were not covered with silence by
the loyalty of the peasantry. These alone found their way into
official reports, and it is these which three of the chief officials
of the country were reading and discussing when the more remarkable
part of this story begins.

Night was far advanced and the lights shone in the cottage that
served for a temporary police station near the coast. On one side of
it were the last houses of the straggling village, and on the other
nothing but a waste moorland stretching away toward the sea, the
line of which was broken by no landmark except a solitary tower of
the prehistoric pattern still found in Ireland, standing up as
slender as a column, but pointed like a pyramid. At a wooden table
in front of the window, which normally looked out on this landscape,
sat two men in plain clothes, but with something of a military
bearing, for indeed they were the two chiefs of the detective
service of that district. The senior of the two, both in age and
rank, was a sturdy man with a short white beard, and frosty eyebrows
fixed in a frown which suggested rather worry than severity.

His name was Morton, and he was a Liverpool man long pickled in the
Irish quarrels, and doing his duty among them in a sour fashion not
altogether unsympathetic. He had spoken a few sentences to his
companion, Nolan, a tall, dark man with a cadaverous equine Irish
face, when he seemed to remember something and touched a bell which