The two lorries then set off to make a large detour in order to approach Bunrattey from the south (the opposite direction to Ballybor), and Blake made out that they ought to arrive there about midnight. The four Crossleys waited and followed at a time which should bring them to Bunrattey a quarter of an hour after the arrival of the lorries. Joyce’s sister’s house stood back from the main road about eighty yards, was one-storied, very strongly built, and had a tremendous thatch of straw; to the front there were four small windows, heavily shuttered, and a stout oak door, and at the back only a door of the same kind. At a distance of about thirty yards from the house a low stone wall ran round the sides and back, enclosing a small cabbage garden and the haggard, which gave excellent cover for the police. The lorries stopped within 400 yards of the house, and the police quickly and silently surrounded it without raising the alarm. They then waited for the arrival of the Crossleys, when the Auxiliaries and the remainder of the police formed a second cordon outside the first one. The leading lorry was now brought into the lane which led up to the house, and left there with the acetylene lamps shining full on the front door and windows, and at the same time the lamps of the second lorry were taken to the back of the house and mounted on the wall, so that any one attempting to leave the house by the doors or windows would be in the full glare of the powerful lamps. Approaching the house from a gable-end, Blake crawled along the front until he reached the door, on which he hammered with the butt of his revolver, and called on the inmates to surrender, telling them that they were surrounded and that resistance only meant death. Receiving no answer, he called out that if they did not come out at once with their hands up, he would open fire on the house, and for reply there came a volley of bullets through the lower part of the door. He then crawled back to cover, and ordered his men to open fire on the front door with a machine-gun. The concentrated fire of a machine-gun will cut a hole through a nine-inch brick wall in a very short time, and in a few minutes the oak door was in splinters. While the machine-gun kept up a continuous fire at the height of a man’s chest, four policemen endeavoured to get into the house by crawling up to the door, but when a few feet away two were shot, and the remaining two only escaped by rolling to one side.