The Ballybor strike collapsed as suddenly as it had started with the disappearance of Paidraig O’Kelly. The previous day a public meeting on the town fair green had been held by the Transport Union, and all the young men and girls of the town and countryside had attended. At first the local firebrands addressed the meeting with their usual grievance, and then O’Kelly spoke for a full hour. At first he confined himself to the strike, and carried his audience with him when he painted a vivid picture of the different lives led by the shopkeepers and their “slaves,” how the former and their families lived on the fat of the land, the latter in the gutter. The crowd had now had all they wanted and were prepared to go home to tea, but O’Kelly had a good deal more to tell them. Suddenly and without any warning he began to unfold the doctrine of Lenin, to show them how the world and all the good things in it ought really to belong to them, and that these good things would never be theirs until the ruling classes were forced to disgorge them, and that the only way to make the swine disgorge was to kill them one and all—gentry, business men, and shopkeepers. The man could really speak, and held his audience spellbound while he unfolded the Irish Eldorado of the future; but through all his speech ran the one idea to kill, always to kill those in a higher station of life than his listeners. To finish with he called upon them to start with the police, to shoot them like the dogs they were, and when they were gone the rest would be easy. Sergeant M’Grath had been detailed to attend the meeting to take down in shorthand any speeches which might require explaining afterwards, but until O’Kelly started to preach the doctrine of Lenin he had not opened his notebook. The sergeant had served in most parts of Ireland, but O’Kelly’s speech and brogue puzzled him: the man spoke like an Englishman trying to imitate the Irish brogue, but with a thickness of speech which the sergeant could not place. Nor could he place the shape of O’Kelly’s head, a round bullet-shaped one with a high narrow forehead and coarse black hair. He duly reported O’Kelly’s speech to the D.I., who endeavoured to find out where the man came from, but failed to get any definite information. One rumour said that O’Kelly came from Cork, another from America, and yet a third that he was a native of Castleport. So the only thing to do was to arrest the man and then try to identify him; but O’Kelly had completely disappeared.