The Scorching Wind by Walter Macken

Author:Walter Macken [Macken, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Chapter Sixteen

ONE THING leads to another. If you set up land courts, you have to set up ordinary courts, and when those make decrees, they have to be enforced. So you have to have your own police to do this, since the police of the foreigners were busy rounding up rebels, and raiding, and shooting up houses and towns, and enforcing the curfew, and they paid no attention to normal criminal activities. The Sinn Fein police had to track those down and bring them to Sinn Fein courts where they were judged by ordinary men with common sense. It was the first time in history that judgements in courts weren’t tied up and wrapped around with yards of impenetrable legal tape and jargon. If criminals were sentenced you had to have jails to put them in, but since all the jails were heavily overcrowded with patriots, sentenced criminals were put in charge of Sinn Fein police who took them away to serve their sentences at unknown destinations. The Sinn Fein police were not armed. People had decided this from the beginning. Their police would be the first unarmed force in the history of the country. So, when the other police captured them, they could put up no defence. They were taken away, received savage sentences, and the criminal they were holding was allowed to go free.

Dominic thought over these things as he sat on a flat rock in this island on Lough Corrib, one of his medical books open between his legs.

It was a beautiful day in January.

It was an almost circular island, rising uniformly all around about six feet from a rocky shore. This rise was a mass of tangled thorn trees, mountain ash, hazel bushes, ferns and briars, which even without foliage provided good shelter for the interior of the island, which consisted of four fields of about ten acres divided by loose stone walls. Five black bullocks of the hardy Connemara breed inhabited the island with himself and Poric and the Tangler.

He rose to his feet at this thought, and went through a path in the bushes to look. Poric and the Tangler were hacking at a field which Paddy No wanted to put under potatoes next year. It was a fairly rocky field. The Tangler wasn’t killing himself, Dominic saw. He looked incongruous with a pickaxe in his hand, and he wearing a bowler hat. His trousers were bagged around his boots, probably because they weren’t his own trousers in the first place. His wrists were thin, and his face was scored with deep lines which made him look like a thinker or a philosopher. He was neither. He was a vicious little fellow, who having bought cattle from several farmers at fairs, followed single ones home, and having knocked them unconscious with a blow of a heavy stick, took what money they had on them.

He was sentenced to six months’ hard labour. This was the third unknown destination they had taken him to. The others had been houses on the mainland.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.