unt the scene of his
crimes and lord it over those whom his misdeeds had sullied, was to the
common mind unthinkable--nay, incredible: a blot on God's good day. To
every potato-setter who, out of the corner of his eye, watched his
passage, to every beggar by the road whose whine masked heart-felt
curses, to the very children who fell back from the cabin door to
escape his evil eye, this was plain and known, and the man already as
the dead. For if the cotters by the lakeside were not men enough, the
nights being at present moonlit, was there not Roaring Andy's band in
the hills, not seven miles away, who would cut any man's throat for a
silver doubloon, and a Protestant's for the "trate it would be, and
sorra a bit of pay at all, the good men!"

Beyond doubt the Colonel's boldness, and the nerve which enabled him to
take his place as if nothing threatened him, went for something; and
for something the sinister prestige which the disappearance of
O'Sullivan Og and his whole party cast about him. For there was wailing
in the house by the jetty: the rising had cost some lives though nipped
in the bud. The evening tide had cast the body of one of the men upon
the shore, where it had been found among the sea-wrack; and, though the
fate of the others remained a mystery, the messenger who had sped after
Og with the counter-order told the story as he knew it. The means by
which the two prisoners, in face of odds so great, had destroyed their
captors, were still a secret; but the worst was feared. The Irish are
ever open to superstitious beliefs, and the man who singlehanded could
wreak such a vengeance, who poured death as it were from a horn, went
his way by road and bog, shrouded in a gloomy fame that might provoke
the bold, but kept the timid at bay. Before night it was known in a
dozen lonely cabins that the Colonel might be shot from behind with
a silver bullet: or stabbed, if a man were bold enough, with a
cross-handled knife, blest and sprinkled. But woe to him whose aim
proved faulty or his hand uncertain! His chance in the grasp of the
Father of ill, or of the mis-shapen Trolls, _revenants_ of a heathen
race, who yearly profaned the Carraghalin with their orgies, had not
been worse!

But this reputation alone, seeing that reckless spirits were not
wanting, nor in the recesses of the hills those whose lives were
forfeit, would have availed him little if the protection of The
McMurrough had not been cast over him. Why i