Having left the castle, Bernard walked briskly away across the open square, past the quay and along the curling stretch of sands which led to the path under the cliffs. He had taken the hammer from his pocket and swung it as he strode onward, whistling as he went.

A mile or so along the strand, he turned off at a footway leading up the rocks, and climbed this nimbly to the top, gaining which, he began to scan closely the broad expanse of dun-colored bog-plain which dipped gradually toward Mount Gabriel. His search was not protracted. He had made out the figures he sought, and straightway set out over the bog, with a light, springing step, still timed to a whistled marching tune, toward them.

“Well, I’ve treed the coon!” was his remark when he had joined Jerry and Linsky. “It was worth waiting for a week just to catch him like that, with his guard down. Wait a minute, then I can be sure of what I’m talking about.”

The others had not invited this adjuration by any overt display of impatience, and they watched the young man now take an envelope from his pocket and work out a sum on its back with a pencil in placid if open-eyed contentment. They both studied him, in fact, much as their grandfathers might have gazed at the learned pig at a fair—as a being with resources and accomplishments quite beyond the laborious necessity of comprehension.

He finished his ciphering, and gave them, in terse summary, the benefit of it.

“The way I figure the thing,” he said, with his eye on the envelope, “is this: The mines were going all right when your man went away, twelve years ago. The output then was worth, say, eight thousand pounds sterling a year. Since then it has once or twice gone as high at twenty thousand pounds, and once it’s been down to eleven thousand pouunds. From all I can gather the average ought to have been, say, fourteen thousand pounds. The mining tenants hold on the usual thirty-one-year lease, paying fifty pounds a year to begin with, and then one-sixteenth on the gross sales. There is a provision of a maximum surface-drainage charge of two pounds an acre, but there’s nothing in that. On my average, the whole royalties would be nine hundred and twenty-five pounds a year. That, in twelve years, would be eleven thousand pounds. I think, myself, that it’s a good deal more; but that’ll do as a starter. And you say O’Daly’s been sending the boss two hundred pounds a year?”

“At laste for tin years—not for the last two,” said Jerry.

“Very well, then; you’ve got nine thousand pounds. The interest on that for two years alone would make up all he sent away.”

“An’ ’t is your idea that O’Daly has putt by all that money?”

“And half as much more; and not a cent of it all belongs to him.”

“Thrue for you; ’t is Miss Katie’s money,” mourned Jerry, shaking his curly red head and disturbing his fat breast with a prolonged sigh. “But she’ll never lay finger to anny of it. Oh, Cormac, you’re the divil!”

The young man sniffed impatiently.

“That’s the worst of you fellows,” he said, sharply. “You take fright like a flock of sheep. What the deuce are you afraid of? No wonder Ireland isn’t free, with men who have got to sit down and cry every few minutes!” Then the spectacle of pained surprise on Jerry’s fat face drove away his mood of criticism. “Or no; I don’t mean that,” he hastened to add; “but really, there’s no earthly reason why O’Daly shouldn’t be brought to book. There’s law here for that sort of thing as much as there is anywhere else.”

“’T was Miss Katie’s own words that I’d be a fool to thry to putt the law on Cormac O’Daly, an’ him an attorney,” explained Jerry, in defiant self-defense.

“Perhaps that’s true about your putting the law on him,” Bernard permitted himself to say. “But you’re a trustee, you tell me, as much as he is, and others can act for you and force him to give his accounts. That can be done upon your trust-deed.”

“Me paper, is it?”

“Yes, the one the boss gave you.”

“Egor! O’Daly has it. He begged me for it, to keep ’em together. If I’d ask him for it, belike he’d refuse me. You’ve no knowledge of the characther of that same O’Daly.”

For just a moment the young man turned away, his face clouded with the shadows of a baffled mind. Then he looked Jerry straight in the eye.

“See here,” he said, “you trust me, don’t you? You believe that I want to act square by you and help you in this thing?”

“I do, sir,” said Jerry, simply.

“Well, then, I tell you that O’Daly can be made to show up, and the whole affair can be set straight, and the young lady—my cousin—can be put into her own again. Only I can’t work in the dark. I can’t play with a partner that ‘finesses’ against me, as a whist-player would say. Now, who is this man here? I know he isn’t your cousin any more than he is mine. What’s his game?”

Linsky took the words out of his puzzled companion’s mouth.

“’T is a long story, sir,” he said, “an’ you’d be no wiser if you were told it. Some time, plase God, you’ll know it all. Just now’t is enough that I’m bound to this man and to The O’Mahony, who’s away, an’ perhaps dead an’ buried, an’ I’m heart an’ sowl for doin’ whatever I can to help the young lady. Only, if you’ll not moind me sayin’ so, she’s her own worst inemy. If she takes the bit in her mouth this way, an’ will go into the convint, how, in the name of glory, are we to stop her or do anything else?”

“There are more than fifteen hundred ways of working that” replied the young man from Houghton County, simulating a confidence he did not wholly feel. “But let’s get along down toward the village.”

They entered Muirisc through the ancient convent churchyard, and at his door-way Jerry, as the visible result of much cogitation, asked the twain in. After offering them glasses of whiskey and water and lighting a pipe, Jerry suddenly resolved upon a further extension of confidence. To Linsky’s astonishment, he took the lantern down from the wall, lighted it, and opened the door at the back of the bed.

“If you’ll come along wid us, sir,” he said to Bernard, “we’ll show you something.”

“There, here we can talk at our aise,” he remarked again, when finally the three men were in the subterranean chamber, with the door closed behind them. “Have you anything like this in Ameriky?”

Bernard was not so greatly impressed as they expected him to be. He stolled about the vault-like room, sounding the walls with his boot, pulling-aside the bed-curtains and investigating the drain.

“Curious old place,” he said, at last. “What’s the idea?”

“Sure, ’t is a sacret place intoirely,” explained Jerry. “Besides us three, there’s not a man a............