gether from Monaghan
and parts of Cavan to mend them for him, and he had even to send
these men into Limerick to buy the material, as not a piece of timber
could be procured in Galway for the use of a household so well
boycotted as was Morony Castle. There had been also various calls on
Mr. Jones from those relatives whose money had been left as mortgages
on his property. And no rent had as yet come in, although various
tenants had been necessarily evicted. Every man's hand was against
him; so that there was no money in his coffers. He who had chiefly
sinned against him,--who was the first to sin,--was the sinner whom
he was about to prosecute at Galway. It must be supposed, therefore,
that he was not in a good humour as he was driven along the road to
Ballyglunin.

They had not yet passed the boundary fence between Carnlough and
the property of one of the numerous race of Bodkins, when Mr. Jones
saw a mask, which he supposed to be a mask worn by a man, through a
hole in the wall just in front of him, but high above his head. And
at the same moment he could see the muzzles of a double-barrelled
rifle presented through the hole in the wall. What he saw he saw
but for a few seconds; but he could see it plainly. He saw it so
plainly as to be able afterwards to swear to a black mask, and to a
double-barrelled gun. Then a trigger was pulled, and one bullet--the
second--went through the collar of his own coat, while the first had
had a more fatal and truer aim. The father jumped up and turning
round saw that his boy had fallen to the ground. "Oh, my God!" said
Peter, and he stopped the horse suddenly. The place was one where the
commencement had been made of a cutting in the road during the potato
failure of 1846; so that the wall and the rifle which had been passed
through it were about four or five feet above the car. Mr. Jones
rushed up the elevation, and clambered, he did not know how, into
the field. There he saw the back of a man speeding along from the
wall, and in the man's hand there was a gun. Mr. Jones looked around
but there was no one nigh him but Peter, the old servant, and his
dying boy. He could see, however, that the man who ran was short of
stature.

But though his rage had sufficed to carry him up from the road into
the field, the idea that his son had been shot caused him to pause
as he ran, and to return to the road. When he got there he found
two girls about seventeen and eighteen years of age, one si