With help, I managed to walk to the corner. Then the other man who had stopped behind to set the building afire caught up with us. Between them they succeeded in carrying me back to the College of Surgeons. As we came into the vestibule, Jo Connolly was waiting with his bicycle, ready to go out with me to bomb the hotel. His surprise at seeing me hurt was as if I had been out for a stroll upon peaceful streets and met with an accident. They laid me on a large table and cut away the coat of my fine, new uniform. I cried over that. Then they found I had been shot in three places, my right side under the arm, my right arm, and in the back on my right side. Had I not turned as I went through that shop-door to call to the others, I would have got all three bullets in my back and lungs and surely been done for. They had to probe several times to get the bullets, and all the while Madam held my hand. But the probing did not hurt as much as she expected it would. My disappointment at not being able to bomb the Hotel Shelbourne was what made me unhappy. They wanted to send me to the hospital across the Green, but I absolutely refused to go. So the men brought in a cot, and the first-aid girls bandaged me, as there was no getting a doctor that night. What really did distress me was my cough and the pain in my chest. When I tried to keep from coughing, I made a queer noise in my throat and noticed every one around me look frightened. "It's no death-rattle," I explained, and they all had to laugh,--that is, all laughed except Commandant Mallin. He said he could not forgive himself as long as he lived for having let me go out on that errand. But he did not live long, poor fellow! I tried to cheer him by pointing out that he had in reality saved my life, since the bombing plan was much more dangerous. Soon after I was brought in, the countess and Councilor Partridge disappeared. When she returned to me, she said very quietly: "You are avenged, my dear." It seems they had gone out to where Fred Ryan lay, and Partridge, to attract the fire of the soldiers across the street in the Sinn Fein Bank, had stooped over the dead boy to lift him. There were only two soldiers and they both fired. That gave Madam a chance to sight them. She fired twice and killed both.