Burton listened, blinking his little eyes, sniffing, biting his nails, fondling the butt of his automatic pistol in his breast pocket. Over on the form, Flynn was sitting, with his broken jaw swathed in a red silk handkerchief. He sat impassively, inscrutably communing with himself. He seemed to be unconscious of his surroundings, with his mind fixed immutably on some infinite problem. The only sounds in the room were the drip, drip of the water from the many roofs and the patter of Gallagher’s voice. His voice was again cold, hard, dominating, vital. CHAPTER XVI At a quarter to four the drizzling rain ceased. A sharp bustling wind arose. It came screaming down from the mountains upon Dublin. It was a hard, mountainous wind, a lean, sulky, snowy wind, that rushed through the sleeping city savagely, so that even the drops of rain on the muddy sidewalks leaned over before it, with frills on them. The clouds arose, their hanging rumps cut away by the newborn wind. They hung high up in the heavens, gashed and torn, with a sour expression on their grey, slattern bodies. Here and there a rent came in the dishevelled panorama of cloud and the sky appeared, blue and chaste and a long way off. This change in the mood of nature occurred when Gypo was bounding away from the Bogey Hole, trembling shakily with excess of energy. He ran through a short, narrow lane, so narrow that his shoulders grazed either side as he dashed through. He crossed a thoroughfare in four strides, casting a look on either side as he leaped across. He saw a sloppy roadway on one side, with a watchman’s glowing brazier at the far end and on the other side a hill. Tall tenement houses lined the thoroughfare, their battered old walls rambling up towards the sky, their squalor hidden by the majesty of the night. He fled across the road and entered a dark archway. Then he bumped suddenly against an old cart and went head-over-heels with a smothered exclamation. The concussion and weight of his body propelled the cart a distance of three yards on its crazy wheels, with the shafts scraping along the ground. He struggled to his feet and was about to rush away again, when a human voice, coming from beneath him, made him stand still. He looked down fiercely. It was only some homeless derelict, who used the archway and the cart as a house and a bed. “The curse of—” began a cracked, shivering voice. Gypo was gone, with a clatter of boots, over the cobblestones of the archway. He debouched into a wide street of new, red-brick houses. He gripped a wall and peered around him, panting for breath, wild with the excitement of his escape.