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Updated: June 27, 2025
"Gully! oh, Gully! It's Inspector Kilbride speaking. I'll give you ten minutes to come out and give yourself up. If you don't well! . . . I've got a charge of dynamite here . . . and a fuse, and I'll blow you and your shack to hell, my man. It's up to you now!" There was no response to the inspector's ultimatum. Amidst dead silence the prescribed time slowly passed.
None other would satisfy him to wrestle with but his dead rival, and indeed he in common with the country people thought that no other might be found fit for him to meet. Kilbride churchyard is high on the mainland, and lies dark within its four stone walls. The road to it is by a tunnel of trees that make a shade velvety black even when the moon is turning all the sea silver.
We'll need yez." Gully murmured some hospitable suggestion to Kilbride, and the two gentlemen strolled into the wrecked bar. The train presently arrived and departed eastwards, bearing on it the inspector, Redmond, and his prisoner. "Strange thing," the officer had remarked musingly to Slavin, just prior to his departure, "I seem to know that man Gully's face, but somehow I can't place him.
As you said, Kilbride it is a very effectual disguise. Will one of you give me a drink, please? My mouth's pretty dry with all this talking." Yorke got up and brought him a glass of water, and he drank it down with a murmur of thanks. "Now!" he said, continuing his narrative: "I'm coming to the worst part of all. You'll all wonder I've not gone mad brooding; but I've got to go through with it.
It wanted four hours yet until train time and inside the living-room the inspector, Slavin, and Yorke were beguiling the interval in low-voiced conversation. "Strange thing, Sergeant," remarked Kilbride musingly, "I can't place him now, but I'll swear I've seen this man, Gully, before; somewhere back of beyond, I guess.
He looked eagerly among the folk he remembered for Ellen's face. There was one who might be she, the ghost of a woman veiled in her shadowy hair, whose eyes he could not see. And then Jack was upon him. That was a great wrestling in Kilbride churchyard.
"For instance" he eyed the inspector keenly "I wasn't known as 'Gully' that time Cronje nailed us all at Doornkop, Kilbride, in 'ninety-six. . . ." Kilbride uttered a startled oath. Shaken out of his habitual stern composure he stared at the man before him in sheer amazement. "Good God!" he cried, "The 'Jameson Raid! . . . Now I know you, man! you're you're wait a bit!
"'Beg yer pardon, Sir! I sez, 'but if you let 'im go back t' Dyvidsburg I fink 'e'll be quite contented. Seems like 'e wants t' be wiv Sorjint Slavin an' Constable Yorke agin. "'Fink so? sez 'e, pullin' 'is oweld moustache, 'I sure do, Sir, I sez. 'So be it, then! 'e sez, turnin' t' Kilbride, but th' Inspector 'e sez nothin': 'e on'y larfs. An' then they went away."
All those things were over a dozen years ago, and he is married again, to a spare, unattractive woman, who looks after his food and clothes, and makes him in her way a very excellent wife. She was long past middle age when he married her and took her out of service. But there was no pretence of love-making about it. She would be the first herself to tell you that her man's heart was in Kilbride.
"Aw, rot!" said Yorke, disgustedly. He sniffed, with his peculiar mannerism, "that's dime-novel stuff, Red. D'ye think he'd be fool enough to risk that, with the chances of the fellow being picked up any minute and squealing on him?" He was silent a moment. "Rum thing, though," he murmured, "the way that hobo did beat us to it." "'Some lokil man, sez Kilbride," remarked Slavin musingly.
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