Suddenly he felt a wet daub coming down each cheek. He started. He was shedding tears. The horror of the act made him stare wild eyed. He swore aloud. He bared his teeth of their covering of thick lips and ground them. His youth went out like a candle that is quenched by a squall in a long passage. The grinning spectre of the present became real once more. He shut his mouth. He sighed very deeply. Putting his hands in his pockets again, he walked off at his habitual slouch, with his head hanging slightly forward, hung on the pivot of his neck like a punchball. “I must make a plan,” he said to himself once more. Somehow he was convinced that the Revolutionary Organization already suspected him of having given information concerning McPhillip. He felt that he was being sought for already. So he must make a plan. He must have a plausible excuse. “If ye got a good aliby,” McPhillip used to say, “the divil himself couldn’t fasten anythin’ on ye.” But how was he going to get an alibi for himself? He walked the whole length of the road three times irresolutely, with his eyes fixed on the ground. He was unable to think of anything. His mind kept branching off into the contemplation of silly things that had nothing at all to do with the question, the favourite for the Grand National and whether Johnny Grimes, the comedian, had drowned himself in the Canal or whether he had been murdered and then thrown in; the two main questions that were agitating the Dublin slums just then. At one moment he decided to go to the Dunboy Lodging House, pay for a bed and go to sleep. But immediately he was terrified at this suggestion. They might know already that he had given information. Then maybe, while he was asleep, somebody would be sent into his little cell with a loaded stick to murder him in his sleep. Or they might give him “the bum’s rush,” breaking his neck silently like a rabbit’s neck. He pictured the little narrow wooden cells in the lodging house, the silence of the night, broken only by the dismal sound of snoring on all sides, an indiscriminate number of unknown people snoring loudly, dreaming, grumbling, snoring and sleeping in all directions, while _“they”_ approached silently to murder him. He shuddered. Perspiration stood out on his forehead. Eagerly, with relief, he decided to keep in the open, where he could use his hands and his strength. If he were going to be murdered he would be murdered with his hands gripping a dead throat. Then at last he stood stock-still and thumped himself in the chest. “Well, I’m damned!” he cried. “Amn’t I an awful fool? Why didn’t I think of it before? They’ll be wonderin’ why I’m not there already. Everybody in the town must ’a heard of it be now, an’ me that was his pal an’ I not there to say a word to his mother. They’ll surely suspect something if I don’t go at once.”