Argosy (UK), January 1955 — page 124: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Y i % «we a? mane = ra 122 W. R. BURNETT He turned, mounted his horse, and rode off towards the orchard and a short cut he knew back to the monastery. Michael felt a sudden presentiment of evil as he rode back to- wards the monastery, skirting the northern edges of the great bog. There was a marked hush over the whole countryside, a sort of waiting stillness that bothered Michael to such an extent that he took out a handkerchief and mopped his brow. Ah, well! It was a difficult thing to say good-bye to your birth- place for ever, and to Catherine—gone, gone . . . a worried woman now, and no longer the laughing, teasing girl he remembered. She belonged to Regis and had taken his problems on her slender shoulders. Catherine, good-bye! And as he:rode along, he began to hum the Bride of Mourne, and then suddenly he stopped humming, remembering all at once Ara, Lady Anne, Princey, the comfortable home in Dublin ... the thousands of guineas in the strong-box . . .. Lord Clayton, Clonmel, and the dancing and gaming and merriment .. . And so he took off his hat and bowed in the direction of shadowy Ballymoure, sleeping its nightly sleep—all dark except for Jimmie O’Hare’s lamp at the corner and the pleasant yellow glow from the windows of the Bonnie Prince Charlie—and into the darkness he called: ‘‘ Good-bye, all. It’s Mick Martin speaking, and I’m going back where I belong.” And then suddenly a pistol was fired beyond the monastery, and Michael saw a faint red glow in the night, and without pausing to reflect, he leapt his horse into a gallop and rode off at right angles to his former course, skirting the back of the monastery and avoid- ing the bog by skilful riding in a district familiar to him since child- hood. No one.could follow here, and yet almost at once he heard some fools on horseback plunging after him, and then cries of dis- may and the soggy sound of a horse falling on the treacherous soft ground, and then more cries and clanking, and suddenly a ragged volley was fired after him, and Michael felt a sledge-hammer blow in the back part of his right thigh and nearly fell from his horse. ** Hit like Doherty, damn it,”’ he cried, and then he spurred his horse into a wild gallop, took a low hedge cleanly, and was free at last on the far side of the monastery in open flat country which stretched for miles, sloping easily down towards the Dublin road. And now, over the tall trees to the eastward, the moon rose, big and white, and far away across the flat meadowland Michael could make out a lone horseman riding all out in his own direction and along a parallel course. Was it to head him off? He leaned forward over his horse’s neck and talked to him, urging him on, trying to outdistance the rider far to his left, but his endeavours were useless; the other horseman kept his place, and finally Michael said to himself: ‘‘ And what the devil kind of horse is the fellow riding! ’’ and then a thought struck him. Trim! It must be Trim on the big roan hunter, a devil for eating up distance even with a man of Doherty’s fourteen stone on his back. Drawing his left-hand pistol, he veered off towards the other comicloooks.comn)