The command for a change of his base of operations reached McKenna on the fifteenth of July, and he at once prepared to obey. Linden also received instructions to second McKenna, but to refrain from making his appearance in Tamaqua until requested by the other detective to do so. The Superintendent’s letter to McKenna did not find him in the enjoyment of the best of spirits for a most dangerous and difficult undertaking, from reasons which I will proceed to explain. The previous day, Frank McAndrew having moved into a house at Indian Ridge Breaker—or Davis’ Breaker, as it was familiarly called—engaged with a number of Mollies in a great carousal, which lasted until midnight, and, having inveigled McKenna into the affair, succeeded in keeping him up and employed, there and elsewhere, all night. This, with a return of a chronic sore throat, from which he was suffering, made him almost ill again. Indian Ridge Breaker is situated on the road by Lanagan’s Patch, leading to Mahanoy City, from Shenandoah, and not far from the shebeen shop of Mrs. Bridget Monaghan, twice a widow, but far from ancient at that, although “fat, fair, and forty” was applicable as an imperfect description of the lady. She occupied the stone basement of a tumbledown, three-story wooden building, the upper floors of which were devoted to the midnight gambols of predatory cats and daily incursions of migratory rats—the hallways filled with webs of spiders that, with the mice, made nests in the corners of the vacant rooms—and her subterranean abode was, like that of handsome Micky Cuff, the habitation of geese, ducks, chickens, goats, and pigs, among which Mrs. Bridget walked, “monarch of all she surveyed.” This was a favorite and frequent place of resort for McAndrew and other Mollies, and the stories that gained circulation concerning the flitting of spirits, clad all in white, through the upper corridors of the structure, at the dead hour of night, and the gleams of an occasional flame—burning pale, sickly, blue and ghastly, as some benighted miner was fain to report to his superstitious household—all may have been due to the meetings of the society in the otherwise untenanted place, and the failure of the impromptu janitor to put up a curtain close enough to prevent a ray of the single candle, lighting their deliberations, from escaping. It was a famous place for the telling of ghost stories, and McKenna, who was an adept at the relation of mysterious events, as well as singing songs and dancing flings and jigs, frequently held the Mollies spell-bound for hours, while he chronicled the scenes he had seen and the ghosts and ghouls he had heard about in the old country. His legends were in great demand, and sometimes he indulged in the narration of one in the presence of the widow, who, meanwhile, would draw herself up close to the story-teller—story-teller in more respects than one, it is to be feared—and declare that the company positively should not leave her