“I see it like this, then,” said Neil Fairlie – and the others listened, for he was an older man, and known to have played a stalwart part in all the struggles of other days. “They tell us it was gunpowder that did it – and indeed I’ve seen some of the stuff that didn’t go off, myself, and gunpowder it is. So here’s old Sullivan’s cottage, full of the stuff, and it’s likely been there for twenty years and more, for the place has been empty that long, with no one near it except kids playing.”

“And couples courting,” put in Paddy Finane, who, though married ten years, was not past the courting urge himself. “Don’t forget them.”

“It’s not gunpowder they’ll be using to court with,” said Neil Fairlie with a laugh. Then he went on: “It was there for twenty years, and it must have come from outside – Dublin, most like – and been left there for safety. I heard tell” – he looked down his nose – “of some men coming one night, and leaving a load of something for Sean Sullivan to take care of, and slipping off next morning, and never coming back to Cloncraig again.”

“They were caught,” said Paddy Finane. “God rest them – they’ve been hung or shot these twenty years. We know that.”

“Well, then …” Neil Fairlie blew noisily down his pipe. “The stuff lies there in the cellar: two years, three years, five years. Sean can keep his mouth shut all right, and there’s no call to use gunpowder in Cloncraig. And then what happens to Sean himself? We know that, too.”

“They killed him.” James Costello, doubly bereaved, broke his silence to hiccup briefly but profoundly. He felt moved to recite the legendary story, which they all knew by heart. In their present mood, it palled no more than did the pattern of Mass on Sundays. “The Black-and-Tans got him, back in 1921, when the murdering bastards were quartered on us. They shot him and his wife and his kids, and all for a little bit of an ambush that didn’t cost them more than a man or two. Who would want to live in the cottage after that?”

“There was a curse on it,” put in Joe Lane the landlord, overhearing, as he came up with a fresh tray of drinks. “That’s what killed the poor children. A curse, I say.”

The others nodded, for form’s sake; they did not agree, but it was not worth disagreement. Joe Lane was a newcomer, and from County Cork at that: let him think what he liked, and say it too. Landlords were the wrong side of the counter, anyway, and always would be.

“The only curse on it,” said Neil Fairlie, half-contemptuously, when Lane had put down the fresh drinks and was gone again, “was that some of the stuff was still dry after so long. And somehow the kids must have touched it off.”

“I heard there was bombs as well,” said James Costello. “Little ones.”