“Silly old ass that Emperor is,” he murmured. “I suppose now he’ll go and sit down beside his yellow crocodiles in the dining-room and try to invent some new kind of dynamite. He ought, as a matter of fact, to be in an asylum. Some day he will be if he doesn’t blow himself up first. Anyhow this is a jolly good business for me. If he chooses to pay me four pounds a day for sitting here twiddling my thumbs, I’m quite content. I only hope it will be some time before they think of looking for me at Rosivera. I must try and hit on a plan for putting the police off the scent. I wonder how long it will last. The Field Marshal suggested four weeks. Seven times four--even putting it as low as four pounds a day--and I’ll try to screw him up a bit--seven times four are twenty-eight. And four times twenty-eight is a hundred and twelve. That with the tenner I’ve got will make £122. I’ll make a clear £100 out of it anyway, and they won’t have time to elect another dispensary doctor before I get out.” CHAPTER IV Patsy Devlin strolled into the Imperial Hotel at noon. He found Jimmy O’Loughlin, the proprietor, behind the bar, and was served at once with a pint of porter. “It’s fine weather for the hay, thanks be to God,” he observed. In Connacht the hay harvest is gathered during the month of August, and Patsy’s comment on the weather was seasonable. “I’ve seen worse,” said Jimmy O’Loughlin. “But what’s on you at all, Patsy, that you haven’t been next or nigh the place this two months or more?” “Be damn! but after the way you behaved over the election of the inspector of sheep dipping, the wonder is that I’d ever enter your door again. What would hinder you giving me the job as soon as another?” Jimmy O’Loughlin did not wish to discuss the subject. He was, as a trader ought to be, a peaceful individual, anxious to live on good terms with all possible customers. He realized that the election was a subject on which Patsy was likely to feel bitterly. He filled another glass with porter from the tap and handed it silently across the counter. Patsy tendered a coin in payment. “I’ll not take it from you,” said Jimmy O’Loughlin heartily. “It would be a queer thing if I wouldn’t give you a sup at my own expense now that you are here after all this length of time. How’s herself?” Patsy Devlin took a pull at the second pint of porter. “She’s only middling. She was complaining these two days of an impression on the chest, and a sort of rumbling within in herself that wouldn’t let her rest easy in her bed.” “Do you tell me that? And did you fetch the doctor to her?” “I did not then.” “And why not?” Patsy Devlin finished the porter and winked across the bar at Jimmy O’Loughlin. Jimmy failed to catch the meaning of the wink. “If it was a red ticket you wanted,” he said, “you know very well that you’ve nothing to do but ask me for it. But Dr. O’Grady, the poor man, would go to you without that.”