It was possible both to oversee and to overhear what went on in the inner room. Larry saw the couple sitting there in close conversation, and in a few minutes realised that the strange countryman was in reality a British Secret Service agent, and that Micky, who had drink taken, was giving the man all the information of the local Volunteers he could. It did not take Larry long to determine what course to take with the Secret Service agent, and he had decided on the same fate for Micky Fee, when he suddenly realised that his prayers had been answered. His quick brain began to work out how many rifles, machine-guns, automatics, and bombs Fee’s father would value the life of his only child at; the more he thought of it, the higher he made the figures. Micky had been on a visit to his grandparents in Ballybor for some months past, and had taken an active interest in the Volunteers. About 2 A.M. the next morning there came a loud knock at the grandparents’ house. When the old man opened the door he found himself looking into the muzzles of a ring of guns, and in a few minutes Master Micky left for an unknown destination. About a fortnight later Michael Fee and his wife received the shock of their lives when they opened their letters at breakfast one morning. Among Fee’s was one bearing the Ballybor postmark, which stated briefly that his son had been tried by a court-martial of the I.R.A. on a charge of giving information to the enemy and condemned to death, and that the sentence would be duly carried out unless Michael Fee presented so many rifles, pistols, machine-guns, bombs, and ammunition to the I.R.A. The letter also stated that Mr Fee’s answer was to be sent to a named Sinn Fein agent in New York within seven days of the receipt of the letter, who would give him a time-limit for handing over the arms, and would also tell him where the arms were to be landed. A P.S. was added suggesting that Fee should bring the arms to Ireland in a yacht, and that he would be able to take his son back to the States in her. For many months the Irish papers had been full of accounts of men taken from their beds in the dead of night and executed outside their homes by armed and masked men; also of the bodies of missing men being found in a field, days after they had disappeared, riddled with bullets. Some of the Irish newspapers tried to throw the blame for these murders on the forces of the Crown by saying that the men wore “trench coats,” but never adding that practically every young man in Ireland nowadays wears a so-called trench-coat.