Ussher’s official triumph in running the “potheen men” to earth leads directly up to the catastrophe. It secures the policeman’s promotion, but inflames to madness his detestation by Thady, who, little better than a peasant himself, sympathises with the peasantry that Ussher is hunting down. Feemy, on the other hand, idolising her lover’s intrepidity, ignores the local misery that is wrought by his daring devotion to duty. She thus unconsciously widens the gulf between her brother and herself. Trollope’s Post Office discipline, hardening his sensibilities, and constantly giving a fresh edge to his natural acumen, fitted him successfully to investigate in all its workings the contraband spirits trade and the spy system used for its detection. This fact gave more than an ordinary novelist’s value to what he had to say on the subject. Among the lower classes, two typical specimens of the human degradation it works are seen in Joe Reynolds and Pat Brady. Reynolds is a mere desperado, waging a truceless war with the world and with law. Brady has never been reduced to Reynolds’ straits for money and food; indeed the occupation alone of squeezing arrears from the Macdermot tenantry has always placed him a little above the dread of starvation. Will the young master of Ballycloran be induced, through Brady as the tool of Reynolds, to join the “boys” in exacting reprisals for the harshness meted out to them by the law?
The “boys” are bent on drawing Thady into their schemes of revenge, likely to prove murderous, upon two of his special abominations, not only Ussher but the builder, Flannelly’s man of business, Keegan, who aimed at himself possessing Ballycloran. With a sigh of relief, the reader finds Thady resist the “boys’” overtures, and, for the time, hopes he may yet be kept from the crowning crime which destiny had seemed to reserve for him. One of Ussher’s most recent captures goes by the name of Tim. This, on a much earlier page, has caused an ejected cottager to anticipate the policeman’s end with the words: “I’d sooner be in Tim’s shoes this night than in Captain Ussher’s, fine gentleman as he thinks hisself.” So far, however, Thady holds aloof from any projects of retribution, likely to involve bloodshed, against the men whose names had become bywords throughout the countryside. Nevertheless, we are still made to feel that, superhuman agencies, in the shape of foreordained circumstances, will draw Thady’s neck into the hangman’s noose.