That night Blake again visited the station-master at his house in the station after midnight; and pretending that he knew for certain that Drake had left the train at Knockshinnagh, warned the man of the serious consequences of refusing to give information. 1 A.M. is an unpleasant hour to interview armed men, and thinking that the police were uncomfortably near and the I.R.A. in the dim distance, the station-master made a full confession. A few minutes before the limited mail arrived at Knockshinnagh on Monday, three armed and masked men had driven up in a Ford car, and directly the train pulled up had made straight for the carriage in which Drake was travelling. At once they seized him, and dragged him, struggling, out of the carriage to the car, and then drove off rapidly in the direction of Ballybor. Before the train pulled out, a stranger in a third-class carriage warned the station-master, in the name of the I.R.A., to give no information to any one. As no further information could be got from the station-master, Blake returned to the barracks, and set out again for Knockshinnagh after breakfast, to endeavour to trace the Ford from there. The road from Knockshinnagh to Ballybor runs practically the whole way through a vast bog, which is drained by the Owenmore river, with a deep fringe of water-meadows on each bank. At intervals side roads connect up the villages on the higher ground near the mountains with the main road. The police had covered nearly three miles of the road without getting any news of Drake or the Ford, when a sharp-eyed sergeant noticed the narrow tracks of a Ford turning up one of these side roads to the east. The car had turned the corner sharply, leaving a deep track of two wheels in the soft ground on the edge of the road. Turning down this side road, they proceeded slowly without seeing any further car-tracks until they came to a long low cottage, standing back about fifteen yards from the road. Here they found tracks which showed that the car had pulled up at the door of the cottage, turned, and returned towards the main road. Leaving his men outside, Blake entered with a sergeant, in time to see the owner bolting out of the back door, only to be caught by the sergeant and brought back. The man said his name was Moran, and protested his loyalty loudly before Blake could ask him a question. In Ireland if you want information badly, often the best way to obtain it is to bluff your opponent into believing that you already know part of it, leaving him to guess as to how much you know. Blake took this line of attack with Moran, and asked him the names of the four men who had called at his cottage on the previous Monday in a car. But Moran knew the game as well as Blake, and denied that any car had been to his house lately, or indeed at any time, whereby Blake knew that the man lied, and had something to conceal.