Pay the Devil - Jack Higgins [51]
He nodded. “I know, Joshua was in the village. He’s just told me all about it. What’s happened to Kevin Rogan? If your uncle allows any harm to come to him, I’ll see him answer for it, if it’s the last thing I do on top of earth.”
“But there’s no question of anything like that,” she said. “He intends to take Kevin into Galway himself. He said the trial would be a mere formality. With the kind of evidence he’ll be able to present, Kevin will hang.”
“That’s probably exactly what will happen” Clay said. “Has there been any news from Shaun Rogan?”
She nodded. “That’s one of the reasons I came to see you. My uncle forbade me to leave the house, so I had to saddle my horse myself and slip out the back way through the orchards. I met Burke’s housekeeper on her way down from his cottage. Apparently, Burke was out all night and decided to spend the day in bed. About an hour ago, Shaun Rogan arrived on horseback with his three younger sons and carried him away at gun-point. They gave her a message for my uncle. If Kevin isn’t returned to them by six o’clock, Burke will hang.”
“Saddle Pegeen for me,” Clay said to Joshua. “It’s the sort of thing I would have expected from Shaun Rogan, but how he managed to seat a horse I’ll never know.”
“What do you intend to do?” she said.
He shrugged. “The first step is obviously to see Shaun Rogan to ask him to stay his hand until I can speak to your uncle. I’d like you to come with me. They seem to hold you in some respect.”
“Your difficulty won’t be in handling the Rogans,” she said, “But in making my uncle see sense.”
He tried to sound reassuring and squeezed her shoulders as they went outside to the horse. “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
It was raining heavily as they crossed the moor, but he paid little heed to it. He was busy with his own thoughts, searching desperately for some solution to a problem that seemed to have only one answer—two men kicking on the end of a rope. If Shaun Rogan and his family were allowed to take the law into their own hands, they were finished. The cavalry would be called in to root them out of their valley once and for all.
As they passed the clump of trees near the head of the valley, Dennis Rogan rode out to join them on a roan mare, a shotgun crooked in one arm. “Is your father below?” Clay asked.
“That he is, Colonel,” Dennis told him. “He was hoping for a word with you. I think Marteen was to ride over, but they’ll be busy trying to fix my father’s leg at the moment.”
“The damned fool,” Clay said. “I told him to keep out of the saddle.”
Dennis nodded to Joanna and moved back into the trees, and they descended the path and galloped past the paddock into the yard. As they dismounted, the door opened and Cathal ran out and helped Joanna to the ground. Clay unstrapped his saddlebags and walked up the steps into the house without a word.
Shaun Rogan was sprawled in the chair by the fire, his foot supported on a stool and his trouser leg had been slit to the waist. His wife leaned over him, trying to stem a steady ooze of blood that trickled down into a basin. Burke was trussed to a chair in one corner, ropes twisted cruelly round his limbs so that he could not move. His eyes gleamed when he saw Clay, but he said nothing.
Clay opened his saddlebags and dropped down onto one knee beside Big Shaun. “I thought I told you to stay off this leg?”
“There was work to be done,” Rogan boomed. “Important work.” His face twisted with pain and he reached for the whiskey bottle.
Several of the stitches had burst and Clay took out a needle and thread and started to repair the damage. As he worked, he said, “I’m sorry to hear about Kevin, but you’re not helping him by taking the action you have.”
“Let’s talk sense, Colonel,” Shaun Rogan said. “Once they get my lad to Galway Gaol, he’s a dead man. Hamilton’s men will tell their version of things and no one else who was in the pub