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rooms in the town where impoverished bachelors feasted on tinned beans, and lousy cabins by the river that looked like ancient starving men themselves, with rotting thatch for hair, and little staring, dull, black windows for eyes. Into those too he went, famously, and never took flea or louse out with him. For he was cleaner than the daylight moon.
    And such a small, clean man when crossed was like a scything blade, the grass, the brambles and the stalks of human nature went down before him, as my father discovered.
    It happened thus.
    One evening as my father and myself in the temple amused ourselves before returning home to our tea, we heard a scuffling and a muttering outside the old iron door. My father looked to me, alert as a dog before it barks.
    'Well, what's this now?' he said, more to himself than to me.
    Three men came in carrying a fourth and, as if driven themselves by an unseen force, seemed to sweep me back from the table, and before I knew what had happened, I had the back of my school dress rubbed against the damp whitewash of the wall. They were like a little hurricane of activity. They were all young men, and the man being carried was no more I would guess than seventeen. He looked a handsome long person enough, and roughly clothed, much mud about him, and grass stains from the bog, and blood. A great deal of thin-looking blood all over his shirt. And he was obviously as dead as a stone.
    The other three lads were all yappering and yammering, hysterical maybe, which caused a hysteria to rise in me. My father however stood darkly by his fireplace, like a man making an effort to be mysterious, his face as blank as you like, but also, I thought, ready to have a thought and act on it if necessary. For the three boys were decked with old rifles and in their pockets bulged other weapons, all haphazardly gathered up as may be after a skirmish. I knew that weapons were the scarcest currency of the war.
    'What are you up to, lads?' said my father. 'There's a method in all this, you know, the bringing in of bodies here, and you can't just carry in a boy out of the blue. Have mercy.'
    'Mr Clear, Mr Clear,' said one of the men, a lad with a severe-looking face and hair seemingly cropped against lice, 'we'd nowhere else to be bringing him.'
    'You know me?' said my father.
    'I know you well enough. I know what foot you dig with anyhow, and I'm told by them that might know that you're not against us, not like many a fool here in Sligo town.'
    'That's as may be,' said my father, 'but who are you? Are you Free Staters or the other lot?'
    'Do we look like Free Staters, and half the mountain bog in our hair?'
    'You don't. So, lads then, what do you want me to do? Who is this fellow here?'
    'This poor man', said the same speaker, 'is Willie Lavelle, and he was seventeen year old, and he's after being killed up there on the mountain by a crowd of mean, unthinking vile bastards that call theyselves soldiers, but are not, and are worser to us than any Black and Tan ever was in the war just gone by. Just as evil bad anyhow. For we were so high in the mountain we were gone fierce cold and hungry and this boy surrendered to them, and us hiding in the heather all right, but nothing would do for them except to be punching and pushing him, and asking him questions. And they were laughing and one sticking his gun in the lad's face, and he was the bravest lad among us, but saving your presence, girl,' he said to me, 'so frightened he pissed his ould pants, because he knew, and you always do know, you know, sir, when a man is going to shoot you, so they say, and because they thought no one was there, no one was looking and no one to see their evil, they let off three bullets into his belly. And they went off merry as you like back down the mountain. By Christ when we have Willie buried we are going to go after them, aren't we, lads? – and settle their hash for them, if we can find them.'
    Then the same man did something unexpected, he