Shenandoah is a handsome little inland town, the center of a productive coal country and the place of residence of many excellent people. This volume, however, will not have much to do with that particular portion of the inhabitants, the Mollies and their associates fully monopolizing and employing the writer’s attention. Among those who were not members of the organization, but still wicked enough to be classed with them, was one Micky Cuff, the proprietor of a small whisky shop in the city. The building, the basement of which Cuff and his family occupied, was a two-story tenement, standing nearly flush with the street, and in its cellar part rather low between floors. One night, about eleven o’clock, after coming from a wake, McKenna found himself with Fergus and Ned Monaghan, for the first time inside Micky Cuff’s groggery. Having such a brace of worthies to introduce him, he made sure of a cordial welcome, and Cuff shook his hand heartily as he said, in his gruff voice—something between the noise produced by filing a mill-saw and that made in the smaller theatres and called sheet-iron thunder: “I’m plazed to mate ye, lad! Make yerself at home here, an’ when ye’re thirsty come in an’ taste our liquor! If you misbehave—which I suppose ye niver do—you’ll be well baten for yer pains!” The detective had received his cue from Fergus never to dispute Cuff, or find fault with anything in his house, unless he wanted a stroke over the head with whatever instrument was most convenient, and therefore accepted the allusion to a fight without sending back his habitual rejoinder: “Two can play at that game!” And it was well for him that he did. Without noticing Cuff’s captiousness, McKenna proposed: “Drinks for four, or five, if Mrs. Cuff would take somewhat!” “Af coorse she wull!” said Cuff; and that dumpy woman with the small face, scanty gray hair, bent shoulders, and meek but deprecatory smile—she felt compelled to express pleasure when her husband told her, as plainly by a look as words could speak, that she must do so—came forward and drank her thimbleful of poteen from the one lonesome, dirty glass, sole remnant of the half dozen she had commenced housekeeping with some thirty years before, and said: “Thanks! This is Jim McKenna, is it? We have heard of you! I am glad to meet any friend of my husband—and Mr. Ferguson!” Ferguson acknowledged the compliment intended, and she retired to the rear of the room, where there was work for her, “doing up” Cuff’s linen. “Sure, an’ ye are that same bould Jim McKenna, what docthered Pat Hennessy’s colt! I knew you be sight long ago, but this is the first time you’ve honored our house with your prisence! Nivermind! Here’s to your betther health, Mr. McKenna!”