One of the chief shareholders of a great coal-bearing area, Franklin Goven by name, decided, to his lasting credit and with the support of all right-minded Irishmen in America, to subsidise from his own pocket a movement to destroy this band of chartered assassins. Acting in concert with important public men in Philadelphia, he applied to the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency for the assistance of an expert in tracking the organisation to its original sources and destroying it for good and all. After full preliminary inquiries, the Agency decided that the ramifications of the secret organisation were so complex and so comprehensive that the real truth as to the operation of its methods could only be reached by planting a spy amidst the very band itself. To this end were enlisted the services of M'Parlan, who under the name of M'Kenna set about the destruction of one of the foulest criminal societies yet known to the world. Mack, as he became known ever afterwards, accordingly began, in 1873, his almost hopeless task of tracing the source of the perpetration of some hundred murders which had taken place within a few years preceding, to make no mention of hundreds of maimings, mutilations and other horrors which were to be attributed to the same propagandism. From the outset it was discovered by Mack, in the course of preliminary goings and comings in the coal country, that connected with the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a well-established benefit society chartered by the Legislature of the State, there was an inner movement composed of members of the Hibernians who were subsidising a criminal organisation of wide-reaching power and influence, not unlike the Italian Black Hand society of our own day. It was clear that at the head of the society was an open and properly constituted body, and connected with it was a secret and criminal movement. Mack began his subsequent sleuth work in approved Irish fashion by becoming a regular customer at one of those low-class Pennsylvania coal-town drinking shops—"speak-easies" they are called by the police, who are well aware that many men who visit them are not the sort loudly to advertise the methods by which they make their living. Here he entered on friendly terms with the landlord, Patrick Dormer by name. Mack, it was certain, was a gifted soul and in every sense what your American so expressively terms "a good mixer"; could sing a rowdy song, foot it to the moving music and "cough up" the ready yarn when it came to his turn. Moreover, he could "keep his end up" when it meant replenishing the convivial glasses, while his passion for what is known as being in the thick of a purely personal mix-up soon made him the most popular Irishman in the coal zones. Most important of all, in view of his especial business, he was what is known among Americans as "a cold soak"—that is to say, he could saturate his system with fire-water and still command his intellect. While his boon companions washed their sodden brains publicly in their beer, Mack, always affecting to be easily susceptible to the effects of Old Crow, was quietly taking mental notes. Accordingly it was not long before he discovered that his friends, when under the influence of Bacchus, were apt to give up certain secret pass-words. Having listened to one of these several times, he carefully learned the exact phrase, and soon after, finding the landlord alone, he invited him to take a drink. Leaning mysteriously over the counter he repeated the mystic pass-word.