This strange situation of an immensely powerful man fighting the shadow of a man continued. Justice was ready with the prison and the hangman; but there was no murderer for the scaffold. But the secret service was bringing in all the time little bits of information--that Paddy Murphy was responsible for this, that Denny Burke had done that. It was useless to arrest Paddy or Denny as there was no concrete proof, for no witness would come forward because of intimidation or out of sympathy, and until the courts martial sat, should a man be brought to trial, no civil jury would convict for like reasons. The police were scattered through the countryside in isolated barracks. In course of time these barracks were roughly fortified with barbed wire and sandbags. In the undisturbed districts as often as not the police found themselves cut off from social amenities through the villagers regarding them with suspicion and fearing to hold communication with them lest they fell under suspicion of being sympathisers and informers. The police waited month after month, never venturing far from barracks, in a state of siege by an invisible enemy. In the disturbed areas the life of the Crown forces was unbearable. Not a man, woman, or child but had been taught to look on them with contempt and hatred. They found themselves picked off as opportunity availed, and they were powerless to say whose hand had pulled the trigger, though probably every villager knew, and knew the road the gunman had taken. They were out in all weathers patrolling the roads and scouring the country for the phantom army, which never materialised, though it left frequent marks of its presence in trenches dug at the turn of roads, in trees felled across the path, and in walls torn down for an obstruction. Indeed, at any hour, at any favourable spot, it might materialise, round a sudden corner, over the shoulder of a hill, from some wooded height above the road. A volley of shots would pour down, and the gunmen would make away across country, of which they knew every inch of ground. The nerves of the police must have been stretched to the breaking point during those patrols, so that hate was breeding in them like maggots in meat.