“Oh,” said Sam, “as far as rebellion goes I don’t see that there’s much to choose between them. However, that doesn’t matter. What happened was this. I got off with my load about five o’clock, and I had a gorgeous spin. There wasn’t a cart or a thing on the roads, and I just let the car rip. I touched sixty miles an hour, and hardly ever dropped below forty. Best run I ever had. Almost the only thing I passed was a motor lorry, going the same way I was. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but it turned out to be important afterwards. It was about seven o’clock when I got out of County Down into Armagh. I began looking out for the fellow who was to meet me. It wasn’t long before I spotted him, standing at a corner, trying to look as if he were a military sentry. You know the sort of thing I mean. Bandolier, belt, and frightfully stiff about the back. He held up his hand and I stopped. ‘A loyal man,’ he said. Well, I was, so far as I knew at that time, so I said ‘You bet.’ ‘That’s not right,’ said he. ‘Give the countersign.’ I hadn’t heard anything about a countersign, so I told him not to be a damned fool, and that I’d break his head if he said I wasn’t a loyal man. That seemed to puzzle him a bit. He got out a notebook and read a page or two, looking at me and the car every now and then as if he wasn’t quite satisfied. I felt pretty sure, of course, that he was the man I wanted. He couldn’t very well be anyone else. So by way of cutting the business short I told him I was loaded up with guns and cartridges, and that I wished he’d hop in and show me where to go. ‘That’s all very fine,’ he said, ‘but you oughtn’t to be in a car like that.’ I told him there was no use arguing about the car. I wasn’t going back to change it to please him. He asked me who I was, and I told him, mentioning that I was the governor’s son. I thought that might help him to make up his mind, and it did. The governor is middling well known up in those parts, and the mention of his name was enough. The fellow climbed in beside me. We hadn’t very far to go, as it turned out, and in the inside of twenty minutes I was driving up the avenue of a big house. The size of it rather surprised me, for I didn’t think O’Meara was well enough off to keep up a place of the kind. However, I was evidently expected, for I was shown into the dining-room by a footman. There were three men at breakfast, my old dad, Dopping--you know Dopping, don’t you?” Dopping is a retired cavalry colonel. I do business for him and know him pretty well He is just the sort of man who would be in the thick of any gun-running that was going on.