“As it was, my son, the thoughts of Noreen’s mother and Ireland were burning too deep in memory.... But we went back. The sun was going down on the little town. It was dirty, shrunken, decayed--that old stone city--and the blithest place a youth ever met a maiden, or passed his boyhood.... Ah, the mothers and youths and maidens and the memories of old Tyrone always sung in my heart--when I could forget England!” Routledge lit a cigarette over the lamp and handed it to Cardinegh without speaking. Jerry did not continue for a moment. Then followed the impression his birthplace made upon him--the veteran with his daughter: “I can’t forget our last look--the old town, shrunken and silent in the midst of her quarries. I heard the muttering in the doorways, as we have heard it in India. The best blood had gone to America; the knitting-works were shut down--the remnant starving. It was like India in plague and famine, but I could have borne that.... It was the next morning when I saw the British garrison quartered upon the town----” “You know how Colonel Hammond felt when something sprung a leak in his brain,” Routledge suggested. “You’ve hit it, boy.... There was the old town, starving at best, with three hundred British soldiers devouring its substance! It made me think of a fallen camel--with a red-necked vulture for every bone in the carcass. And that’s Ireland and that’s India!” The whiskey was bright in the old man’s eyes. “Look out, Routledge, when you hear a snap in your brain! You said something to that effect.... I went back to India, as you know, up from Calcutta to Sarjilid, where I met the Russo-Parsee. I thought of Noreen and her mother, and Tyrone, and the service of England, which I know as well as you. I thought of India. “What did I find in Sarjilid? There was a famine there, too, and a garrison of red-necked vultures; sand blowing down from the windy hills; stench from the huts; voices from the doorways; a salt-tax that augmented the famine because the people needed but could not buy their own product; naked brown children, fleshless as empty snake-skins--but I won’t go on! I must go to the war-office presently.... It was at Sarjilid that I met the Russian.... It may be that I am another Colonel Hammond, but I gave the documents away. He was an enchanting chap--that Russian!” Cardinegh here whispered the details of his treachery. The politics of the world would not be cleaned by the dialogue, but the big fact remains that the documents concerning Colonel Hammond’s dynamite went into Russian hands--a fire-brand for her to ignite Afghanistan, the Indian Border, and British mutinies. “Then I went back into the field to watch. Weeks passed,” he continued hastily. “We met in Bhurpal, and you told me what you had discovered. I knew. Each day was a brimming beaker of joy to me then. I saw British India shudder at the broken vessel of her secrets.