At five o’clock on this February morning it was still dark. For more than half an hour a light had been from time to time visible, flitting about in the inhabited parts of the castle. There was no answering gleams from any of the cottage windows, along the other side of the village green; but all the same, solitary figures began to emerge from the cabins, until eighteen men had crossed the open space and were gathered upon the little stone pier at the edge of the muirisc. They stood silently together, with only now and again a whispered word, waiting for they knew not what.
Presently, by the faint semblance of light which was creeping up behind the eastern hills, they saw Jerry, Malachy and Dominic approaching, each bearing a burden on his back. These were two of the long coffin-like boxes and two kegs, one prodigiously heavy, the other by comparison light. They were deposited on the wharf without a word, and the two first went back again, while Dominic silently led the others in the task of bestowing what all present knew to be guns, lead and powder, on board the Hen Hawk. This had been done, and the men had again waited for some minutes before The O’Mahony made his appearanee.
He advanced through the obscure morning twilight with a brisk step, whistling softly as he came. The men noted that he wore shooting-clothes, with gaiters to the knee, and a wide-brimmed, soft, black hat, even then known in Ireland as the American hat, just as the Americans had previously called it the Kossuth.
Half-way, but within full view of the waiting group, he stopped, and looked critically at the sky. Then he stepped aside from the path, and took off this hat of his. The men wondered what it meant.
Jerry was coming along again from the castle, his arms half filled with parcels. He stopped beside the chief, and stood facing the path, removing his cap as well.
Then the puzzled observers saw Malachy looming out of the misty shadows, also bare-headed, and carrying at arms length before him a square case, about in bulk like a hat-box. As he passed The O’Mahony and Jerry they bowed, and then fell in behind him, and marched, still uncovered, toward the landing-place.
The tide was at its flood, and the Hen Hawk had been hauled by ropes up close to the wharf. Malachy, with stolid face and solemn mien, strode in fine military style over the gunwale and along the flush deck to the bow. Here he deposited his mysterious burden, bowed to it, and then put on the hat he had been carrying under his arm.
The men crowded on board at this—all save two, who now rowed forward in a small boat, and began pulling the Hen Hawk out over the bar with a hawser. As the unwieldy craft slowly moved, The O’Mahony turned a long, ruminative gaze upon the sleeping hamlet they were leaving behind. The whole eastern sky was awake now with light—light which lay in brilliant bars of lemon hue upon the hill-tops, and mellowed upward through opal and pearl into fleecy ashen tints. The two in the boat dropped behind, fastened their tiny craft to the stern, and clambered on board.
A fresh, chill breeze caught and filled the jib once they had passed the bar, and the crew laid their hands upon the ropes, expecting orders to hoist the mainsail and mizzen-sheets. But The O’Mahony gave no sign, and lounged in silence against the tiller, spitting over the taffrail into the water, until the vessel had rounded the point and stood well off the cliffs, out of sight of Muirisc, plunging softly along through the swell. Then he beckoned Dominic to the helm, and walked over toward the mast, with a gesture which summoned the whole score of men about him. To them he began the first speech he had ever made in his life:
“Now, boys,” he said, “prob’ly you’ve noticed that the name’s been painted off the starn of this ere vessel, over night. You must ’a’ figured it out from that, that we’re out on the loose, so to speak. Thay’s only a few of ye that have ever known me as a Fenian. It was agin the rules that you should know me, but I’ve known you all, an’ I’ve be’n watchin’ you drill, night after night, unbeknown to you. In fact, it come to the same thing as my drillin’ you myself—because, until I taught your center, Jerry, he knew about as much about it as a pig knows about ironin’ a shirt. Well, now you all see me. I’m your boss Fenian in these parts.”
“Huroo!” cried the men, waving their hats.
I don’t really suppose this intelligence surprised them in the least, but they fell gracefully in with The O’Mahony’s wish that it should seem to do so, as is the polite wont of their race.
“Well,” he continued, colloquially, “here we are! We’ve been waitin’ and workin’ for a deuce of a long time. Now, at last, they’s somethin’ for us to do. It ain’t my fault that it didn’t come months and months ago. But that don’t matter now. What I want to know is: are you game to follow me?”
“We are, O’Mahony!” they called out, as one man.
“That’s right. I guess you know me well enough by this time to know I don’t ask no man to go where I’m afeared to go myself. There’s goin’ to be some fightin’, though, an’ you fellows are new to that sort of thing. Now, I’ve b’en a soldier, on an’ off, a good share of my life. I ain’t a bit braver than you are, only I know more about what it’s like than you do. An’ besides, I should be all-fired sorry to have any of ye git hurt. You’ve all b’en as good to me as your skins could hold, an’ I’ll do my best to see you through this thing, safe an’ sound.”
“Cheers for The O’Mahony!” some one cried out, excitedly; but he held up a warning hand.
“Better not holler till you git out o’ the woods,” he said, and then went on: “Seein’ that you’ve never, any of you, be’n under fire, I’ve thought of somethin’ that’ll help you to keep a stiff upper-lip, when the time comes to need it. A good many of you are O’Mahonys born; all of you come from men who have followed The O’Mahony of their time in battle. Well, in them old days, you know, they used to carry their cathach with them, to bring ’em luck, same as American boys spit on their bait when they’re fishin’. So I’ve had Malachy, here, bring along a box, specially made for the purpose, an’ it’s chuck full of the bones of a family saint of mine. We found him—me an’ Jerry—after the wind had blown part of the convent down, layin’ just where he was put when he died, with the crucifix in his hands, and a monk’s gown on. I ain’t a very good man, an’ p’r’aps you fellows have noticed that I ain’t much of a hand for church, or that sort of thing; but I says to myself, when I found this dead an’ dried body of an O’Mahony who was pious an’ good an’ all that: ‘You shall come along with us, friend, an’ see our tussle through.’ He was an Irishman in the days when Irishmen run their own country in their own way, an’ I thought he’d be glad to come along with us now, an’ see whether we was fit to call ourselves Irishmen, too. An’ I reckon you’ll be glad, too, to have him with us.”
Stirred by a solitary impulse, the men looked toward the box at the bow—a rudely built little chest, with strips of worn leather nailed to its sides and top—and took off their hats.
“We are, O’Mahony!” they cried.
“Up with your sails, then!” The O’Mahony shouted, with a sudden change to eager animation. And in a twinkling the Hen Hawk had ceased dal lying, and, with stiffly bowed canvas and a buoyant, forward careen, was kicking the spray behind her into the receding picture of the Dunmanus cliffs.
Nearly five hours later, a little council, or, one might better say, dialogue of war, was held at the stern of the speeding vessel. The rifles had long since been taken out and put together, and the cartridges which Jerry had already made up distributed. The men were gathered forward, ready for whatever adventure their chief had in mind.
“I’m goin’ to lay to in a minute or two,” confided The O’Mahony to Jerry, in an undertone.
Jerry looked inquiringly up and down the deserted stretch of brown headlands before them. Not a sign of habitation was in view.
“Is it this we’ve come to besayge and capture?” he asked, with incredulity.
“No. Right round that corner, though, lays the marteller tower we’re after. Up to yesterday my plan was jest to sail bang up to her an’ walk in. But somethin ’s happened to change my notions. They’ve sent a fellow—an American Irishman—to be what they call my ‘cojutor.’ I don’t jest know what it means; but, whatever it is, I don’t think much of it. He’s waitin’ over there for me to land. Well, now, I’m goin’ to land here instid, an’ take five of the men with me, an’ kind o’ santer down toward the tower from the land side, keepin’ behind the hedges. You’ll stay on board here, with Dominic at the helm under your orders, and only the jib and mizzen-top up, and jest mosey along into the cove toward the tower, keepin’ your men out o’ sight and watchin’ for me. If there’s a nigger in the fence, I’ll smoke him out that way.”
Some further directions in detail followed, and then the bulk of the canvas was struck, and the vessel hove to. The small boat was drawn to the side, and the landing party descended to it. One of their own number took the oars, for it was intended to keep the boat in waiting on the beach. Their guns lay in the bottom, and they were conscious of a novel weight of ammunition in their pockets. They waved their hands in salution to the friends and neighbors they were leaving, and then, with a vigorous sweep of the oars, the boat went tossing on her course to the barren, rocky shore.
The O’Mahony, curled up on the seat at the bow, scanned the wide prospect with a roving scrutiny. No sail was visible on the whole horizon. A drab, hazy stain over the distant sky-line told only that the track of the great Atlantic steamers lay outward many miles. On the land side—where rough, blackened boulders rose in ugly points from the lapping water, as outposts to serried ranks of lichened rocks which, in their turn, straggled backward in slanting ascent to the summit, masked by shaggy growths of furze—no token of human life was visible.
A landing-place was found, and the boat securely drawm up on shore beyond highwater mark. Then The O’Mahony led the way, gun in hand, across the slippery reach of wet sea-weed, and thence, by winding courses, obliquely up the hillside. He climbed from crag to crag with the agility of a goat, but the practiced Muirisc men kept close at his heels.
Arrived at the top, he paused in the shelter of the furze bushes to study the situation.
It was a great and beautiful panorama upon which he looked meditatively down. The broad bay lay proudly in the arms of an encircling wall of cliffs, whose terraced heights rose and spread with the dignity of some amphitheatre of the giants. At their base, the blue waters broke in a caressing ripple of cream-like foam; afar off, the sunshine crowned their purple heads with a golden haze. Through the center of this noble sweep of sheltering hills cleft the wooded gorge of a river, whose mouth kissed the strand in the screening shadow of a huge mound, reared precipitously above the sea-front, but linked by level stretches of sward to the mainland behind. On the summit of this mound, overlooking the bay, was one of those curious old martello towers with which England marked the low comedy stage of her panic about Bonaparte’s invasion.
The tower—a squat, circular stone fort, with a basement for magazine purposes, and an upper story for defensive operations—kept its look-out for Corsican ghosts in solitude. Considerably to this side, on the edge of the cliff, was a white cluster of coast-guard houses, in the yard of which two or three elderly men in sailor attire could be seen sunning themselves. Away in the distance, on the farther bend of the bay, the roofs and walls of a cluster of cottages were visible, and above these, among the trees, scattered glimpses of wealthier residences.
Of all this vast spectacle The O’Mahony saw nothing but the martello tower, and the several approaches to it past the coast-guard houses. He chose the best of these, and led the way, crouching low behind the line of hedges, until the whole party halted in the cover of a clump of young sycamores, upon the edge of the open space leading to the mound. A hundred feet away from them, at the base of a jagged bowlder of black slatish substance, stood a man, his face turned toward the tower and the sea. It was Linsky.
After a time he lifted his hand, as if in signal to some one beyond.
The O’Mahony, from his shelter behind, could see that the Hen Hawk had rounded the point, and was lazily rocking her way along across the bay, shoreward toward the tower. For a moment he assumed that Linsky’s sign was intended for the vessel.
Then some transitory movement on the surface of the tower itself caught his wandering glance, and in the instant he had mastered every detail of a most striking incident. A man in a red coat had suddenly appeared at the landward window of the martello tower, made a signal to Linskey, and vanished like a flash.
The O’Mahony thoughtfully raised his rifle, and fastened his attention upon that portion of Linsky’s breast and torso which showed above the black, unshaken sight at the end of its barrel.
The Hen Hawk was idly drifting into the cove toward the little fishing-smack pier of stone and piles which ran out like a tongue from the lower end of the mound. Only two of her men were visible on deck. A group of gulls wheeled and floated about the thick little craft as she crawled landward.
These things The O’Mahony vaguely noted as a background to the figure of the traitor by the rock, which he studied now with a hard-lined face and stony glance over the shining rifle-barrel.
He hesitated, let the weapon sink, raised it again—then once for all put it down. He would not shoot Linsky.
But the problem what to do instead pressed all the more urgently for solution.
The O’Mahony pondered it gravely, with an alert gaze scanning the whole field of the rock, the towered mound and the waters beyond for helping hints. All at once his face brightened in token of a plan resolved upon. He whispered some hurried directions to his companions, and then, gun in hand, quitted his ambush. Bending low, with long, stealthy strides, he stole along the line of yew hedge to the rear of the rock which sheltered Linsky. He reached it without discovery, and, still noiselessly, half slipped, half leaped down the earthern bank beside it. At this instant his shadow betrayed him. Linsky turned, his lips opened to speak. Then, without a word, he reeled and fell like a log under a terrific sidelong blow on jaw and skull from the stock of The O’Mahony’s clubbed gun.
The excited watchers from the sycamore shield behind saw him fall, and saw their leader spring upon his sinking form and drag it backward out of sight of the martello tower. Linsky was wearing a noticeable russet-brown short coat. They saw The O’Mahony strip this off the other’s prostrate body and exchange it for his own. Then he put on Linsky’s hat—a drab, low-crowned felt, pulled well over his eyes—and stood out boldly in the noon sunlight, courting observation from the tower. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and spread it out upon the black surface of the rock, and began pacing up and down before it with his eyes on the tower.
Presently the same red-coated apparition was momentarily visible at the land-side window. The O’Mahony held up his hand and went through a complicated gesture which should signify that he was coming over to the tower, and desired the other to come down and talk with him. This other gave a sign of comprehension and assent, and disappeared.
The O’Mahony walked, unarmed, and with a light, springing step, across the sloping sward to the tower. He paused at the side of its gray wall for an instant, to note that the Hen Hawk lay only a few feet distant from the pier-end. Then he entered the open ground-door of the tower, and found himself in a circular, low, stone room, which, though whitewashed, seemed dark, after the bright sunlight outside. Some barrels stood in a row against the wall, and one of these was filled with soiled cotton-waste which had been used for cleaning guns. The newcomer helped himself to a large handful of this, and took from his pocket a compact coil of stout packing-cord. Then he moved toward the little iron staircase at the other end of the chamber, and, leaning with his back against it, waited.
The next minute the door above opened, and the clatter of spurred boots rang out on the metal steps. The O’Mahony’s sidelong glance saw two legs, clad in blue regimental trowsers with a red stripe, descend past his head, and then the flaring vision of a scarlet jacket.
“Well, they’re landing, it seems,” said the officer, as his foot was on the bottom step.
The O’Mahony turned like a leopard, and sprang forward, flinging his arm around the other’s neck, and jamming him backward against the steps and wall, while, with his free hand, he thrust the greasy, noxious rags into his mouth and face. The struggle between the two strong men was fierce for a moment. Then the officer, blinded and choking under the gag, felt himself being helplessly bound, as if with wires, so tightly were the merciless ligatures drawn round arms and legs and head—and then hoisted into mid-air, and ignominiously jolted forward through space, with the effect of riding pickaback on a giant kangaroo.
The O’Mahony emerged from the tower, bent almost double under the burden of the stalwart captive, who still kept up a vain, writhing attempt at resistance. The whole episode had lasted scarcely two minutes, and no one above seemed to have heard the few muffled sounds of the conflict.
With a single glance toward the companions he had left in hiding among the sycamores, he began a hasty, staggering course diagonally down the side of the mound toward the water-front. He did not even stop to learn whether pursuit was on foot, or if his orders had been obeyed concerning Linsky.
At the foot of the hill he had to force his way through a thick thorn hedge to gain the roadway leading to the pier. Weighted as he was, the task was a difficult one, and when it was at last triumphantly accomplished, his clothes hung in tatters about him, and he was covered with scratches. He doggedly made his way onward, however, with bowed, bare head and set teeth, stumbling along the quay to the vessel’s edge. The Hen Hawk had been brought up to the pier-corner, and The O’Mahony, staggering over the gunwale, let his burden fall, none too gently, upon the deck.
A score of yards to the rear, came, at a loping dog-trot, the five men he had left behind him among the trees. One of them bore an armful of guns and his master’s discarded coat and hat. Each of the others grasped either a leg or an arm of the still insensible Linsky, and, as they in turn leapt upon the vessel, they slung him, face downward and supinely limp, sprawling beside the officer.
With all swiftness, sails were rattled up, and the weight of half-a-dozen brawny shoulders laid against pike-poles to push the vessel off.
The tower had suddenly taken the alarm! The reverberating “boom-m-m” of a cannon sent its echoes from cliff to cliff, and the casement windows under the machicolated eaves were bristling with gun-barrels flashing in the noon-day sun.
For one anxious minute—even as the red-coats began to issue, like a file of wasps, from the doorway at the bottom of the tower—the sails hung slack. Then a shifting land-breeze caught and filled the sheets, the Hen Hawk shook herself, dipped her beak in the sunny waters—and glided serenely forward.
She was standing out to sea, a fair hundred yards from land, when the score of soldiers came to the finish of their chase on the pier-end, and gazed, with hot faces and short breath, upon her receding hull. She was still within range, and they instinctively half-poised their guns to shoot. But here was the difficulty: The O’Mahony had lifted the grotesquely bound and gagged figure of their commanding officer, and held it upright beside him at the helm.
For this reason they forbore to shoot, and contented themselves with a verbal volley of curses and shouts of rage, which may have startled the circling gulls, but raised only a staid momentary smile on the gaunt face of The O’Mahony. He shrilled back a prompt rejoinder in the teeth of the breeze, which belongs to polite literature no more than did the cries to which it was a response.
Thus the Hen Hawk ploughed her steady way out to open sea—until the red-coats which had been dodging about on the heights above were lost to sight through even the strongest glass, and the brown headlands of the coast had become only dim shadows of blue haze on the sky line.
Linsky had been borne below, to have his head washed and bandaged, and then to sleep his swoon off, if so be that he was to recover sensibility at all during what remained to him of terrestrial existence. The British officer had even before that been relieved of the odious gun-rag gag, and some of the more uncomfortable of his bonds. He had been given a seat, too, on a coil of rope beside the capstan—against which he leaned in obdurate silence, with his brows bent in a prolonged scowl of disgust and wrath. More than one of the crew, and of the non-maritime Muirisc men as well, had asked him if he wanted anything, and got not so much as a shake of the head in reply.
The O’Mahony paced up and down the forward deck, for a long time, watching this captive of his, and vaguely revolving in his thoughts the problem of what to do with him. The taking of prisoners had been no part of his original scheme. Indeed, for that matter, nothing of this original scheme seemed to be left. He had had, he realized now, a distinct foreboding of Linsky’s treachery. Yet its discovery had as completely altered everything as if it had come upon him entirely unawares. He had done none of the things which he had planned to do. The cathach had been brought for nothing. Not a shot had been fired. The martello tower remained untaken.
When he ruminated upon these things he ground his teeth and pressed his thin lips together. It was all Linsky’s doing. He had Linsky safe below, however. It would be strange indeed if this fact did not turn out to have interesting consequences; but there would be time enough later on to deal with that.
The presence of the British officer was of more immediate importance. The O’Mahony walked again past the capstan, and looked his prisoner over askance. He was a tall man, well on in the thirties, slender, yet with athletic shoulders; his close-cropped hair and short moustache were of the color of flax; his face and neck were weather-beaten and browned. The face was a good one, with shapely features and a straightforward expression, albeit, seen now at its worst, under a scowl and the smear of the rags. After much hesitation The O’Mahony finally made up his mind to speak, and walked around to confront the officer with an amiable nod.
“S’pose you’re jest mad through an’ through at bein’ grabbed that way an’ tied up like a calf goin’ to market, an’ run out in that sort o’ style,” he said, in a cheerfully confidential tone. “I know I’d be jest bilin’! But I hope you don’t bear no malice. It had to be done, an’ done that way, too! You kin see that yourself.”
The Englishman looked up with surly brevity of glance at the speaker, and then contemptuously turned his face away. He said never a word.
The O’Mahony continued, affably:
“One thing I’m sorry for: It was pritty rough to have your mouth stuffed with gun-wipers; but, really, there wasn’t anything else handy, and time was pressin’. Now what d’ye say to havin’ a drink—jest to rense the taste out o’ your mouth?”
The officer kept his eyes fixed on the distant horizon. His lips twitched under the mustache with a movement that might signify temptation, but more probably reflected an impulse to tell his questioner to go to the devil. Whichever it was he said nothing.
The O’Mahony spoke again, with the least suspicion of acerbity in his tone.
“See here,” he said; “don’t flatter yourself that I’m worryin’ much whether you take a drink or not; an’ I’m not a man that’s much given to takin’ slack from anybody, whether they wear shoulder-straps or not. You’re my pris’ner. I took you—took you myself, an’ let you have a good lively rassle for your money. It wasn’t jest open an’ aboveboard, p’r’aps, but then you was layin’ there with your men hid, dependin’ on a sneak an’ a traitor to deliver me an’ my fellows into your hands. So it’s as broad as ’tis long. Only I don’t want to make it especially rough for you, an’ I thought I’d offer you a drink, an’ have a talk with you about what’s to be done next. But if you’re too mad to talk or drink, either, why, I kin wait till you cool down.”
Once more the officer looked up, and this time, after some hesitation, he spoke, stiffly; “I should like some whisky and water, if you have it—and will be good enough,” he said.
The O’Mahony brought the beverage from below with his own hand. Then, as on a sudden thought, he took out his knife, knelt down and cut all the cords which still bound the other’s limbs.
The officer got gingerly up on his feet, kicked his legs out straight and stretched his arms.
“I wish you had done that before,” he said, taking the glass and eagerly drinking off the contents.
“I dunno why I didn’t think of it,” said The O’Mahony, with genuine regret. “Fact is, I had so many other things on my mind. This findin’ yourself sold out by a fellow that you trusted with your life is enough to kerflummux any man.”
“That ought not to surprise any Irishman, I should think,” said the other, curtly. “However much Irish conspiracies may differ in other respects, they’re invariably alike in one thing. There’s always an Irishman who sells the secret to the government.”
The O’Mahony made no immediate answer. The bitter remark had suddenly suggested to him the possibility that all the other movements in Cork and Kerry, planned for that day, had also been betrayed! He had been too gravely occupied with his own concerns to give this a thought before. As he turned the notion over now in his mind, it assumed the form of a settled conviction of universal treachery.
“There’s a darned sight o’ truth in what you say,” he assented, seriously, after a pause.
The tone of the reply took the English officer by surprise. He looked up with more interest, and the expression of cold sulkiness faded from his face. “You got off with great luck,” he said. “If they had many more like you, perhaps they might do something worth while. You’re an Irish-American, I fancy? And you have seen military service?”
The O’Mahony answered both questions with an affirmative nod.
“Then I’m astonished,” the officer went on, “that you and men like you, who know what war is really like, should come over here, and spend your money and risk your lives and liberty, without the hope of doing anything more than cause us a certain amount of bother. As a soldier, you must know that you have no earthly chance of success. The odds are ten thousand to one against you.”
The O’Mahony’s eyes permitted themselves a momentary twinkle. “Well, now, mister,” he said, carelessly; “I dunno so much about that. Take you an’ me, now, f’r instance, jest as we stand: I don’t reckon that bettin’ men ’u’d precisely tumble over one another in the rush to put their money on you. Maybe I’m no judge, but that’s the way it looks to me. What do you think yourself, now—honest Injun?”
The Englishman was not responsive to this light view of the situation. He frowned again, and pettishly shrugged his shoulders.
“Of course, I did not refer to that!” he said. “My misadventure is ridiculous and—ah—personally inconvenient—but it—ah—isn’t war. You take nothing by it.”
“Oh, yes—I’ve taken a good deal—too much, in fact,” said The O’Mahony, going off into a brown study over the burden of his acquisitions which his words conjured up. He paced up and down beside his prisoner for a minute or two. Then he halted, and turned to him for counsel.
“What do you think, yourself, would be the best thing for me to do with you, now’t I’ve got you?” he asked.
“Oh—really!—really, I must decline to advise with you upon the subject,” the other replied, frostily.
“On the one hand,” mused The O’Mahony, aloud, “you got scooped in afore you had time to fire a shot, or do any mischief at all—so ’t we don’t owe you no grudge, so to speak. Well, that’s in your favor. And then there’s your mouth rammed full of gun-waste—that ought to count some on your side, too.”
The Englishman looked at him, curiosity struggling with dislike in his glance, but said nothing.
“On ’t’ other hand,” pursued The O’Mahony, “you ain’t quite a prisoner of war, because you was openly dealin’ with a traitor and spy, and playin’ to come the gouge game over me an’ my men. That’s a good deal ag’in’ you. For sake of argument, let’s say the thing is a saw-off, so far as what’s happened already is concerned. The big question is: What’s goin’ to happen?”
“Really—” the officer began again, and then closed his lips abruptly.
“Yes,” the other went on, “that’s where the shoe pinches. I s’pose now, if I was to land you on the coast yonder, anywhere, you wouldn’t give your word to not start an alarm for forty-eight hours, would you?”
“Certainly not!” said the Englishman, with prompt decision.
“No, I thought not. Of course, the alarm’s been given hours ago, but your men didn’t see me, or git enough of a notion of my outfit to make their description dangerous. It’s different with you.”
The officer nodded his head to indicate that he was becoming interested in the situation, and saw the point.
“So that really the most sensible thing I could do, for myself and my men, ’u’d be to lash you to a keg of lead and drop you overboard—wouldn’t it, now?”
The Englishman kept his eyes fixed on the middle distance of gently, heaving waters, and did not answer the question. The O’Mahony, watching his unmoved countenance with respect, made pretense of waiting for a reply, and leaned idly against the capstan to fill his pipe. After a long pause he was forced to break the silence.
“It sounds rough,” he said; “but it’s the safest way out of the thing. Got a wife an’ family?”
The officer turned for the fraction of an instant to scrowl indignantly, the while he snapped out:
“That’s none of your d——d business!”
Whistling softly to himself, with brows a trifle lifted to express surprise, The O’Mahony walked the whole length of the deck and back, pondering this reply:
“I’ve made up my mind,” he announced at last, upon his return. “We’ll land you in an hour or so—or at least give you the dingey and some food and drink, and let you row yourself in, say, six or seven miles. You can manage it all right before nightfall—an’ I’ll take my chances on your startin’ the hue-an’-cry.”
“Understand, I promise nothing!” interposed the other.
“No, that’s all right,” said The O’Mahony. “Mind, if I thought there was any way by which you was likely to get these men o’ mine into trouble, I’d have no more scruple about jumpin’ you into the water there than I would about pullin’ a fish out of it. But, as I figure it out, they don’t stand in any danger. As for me—well, as I said, I’ll take my chances. It’ll make me a heap o’ trouble, I dare say, but I deserve that. This trip o’ mine’s been a fool-performance from the word ‘go,’ and it’s only fair I should pay for it.”
The Englishman looked up at the yawl rigging, taut under the strain of filled sails; at the men huddled together forward; last of all at his captor. His eyes softened.
“You’re not half a bad sort,” he said, “in—ah—spite of the gun-waste. I should think it likely that your men would never be troubled, if they go home, and—ah—behave sensibly.”
The O’Mahony nodded as if a pledge had been given.
“That’s what I want,” he said. “They are simply good fellows who jest went into this thing on my account.”
“But in all human probability,” the officer went on, “you will be caught and punished. It will be a miracle if you escape.”
The O’Mahony blew smoke from his pipe with an incredulous grin, and the other went on:
“It does not rest alone with me, I assure you. A minute detailed description of your person, Captain Harrier, has been in our possession for two days.”
“I-gad! that reminds me,” broke in The O’Mahony, his face darkening as he spoke—“the man who gave you that name and that description is lyin’ down-stairs with a cracked skull.”
“I don’t know that it is any part of my duty,” said the officer; “to interest myself in that person, or—ah—what befalls him.”
“No,” said The O’Mahony, “I guess not! I guess not!”
The red winter sun sank to hide itself below the waste of Atlantic waters as the Hen Hawk, still held snugly in the grasp of the breeze, beat round the grim cliffs of Three-Castle Head, and entered Dun-manus Bay. The Englishman had been set adrift hours before, and by this time, no doubt, the telegraph had spread to every remotest point on the Southern and Western coast warning descriptions of the vessel and its master. Perhaps even now their winged flight into the west was being followed from Cape Clear, which lay behind them in the misty and darkening distance. Still the Hen Hawk’s course was confidently shaped homeward, for many miles of bog and moorland separated Muirisc from any electric current.
The O’Mahony had hung in meditative solitude over the tiller for hours, watching the squatting groups of retainers playing silently at “spoil-five” on the forward deck, and revolving in his mind the thousand and one confused and clashing thoughts which this queer new situation suggested. As the sun went down he called to Jerry, and the two, standing together at the stern, looked upon the great ball of fire descending behind the gray expanse of trackless waters, without a word. Rude and untutored as they were, both were conscious, in some vague way, that when this sun should rise again their world would be a different thing.
“Well, pard,” said the master, when only a bar of flaming orange marked where the day had gone, “it’ll be a considerable spell, I reckon, afore I see that sort o’ thing in these waters again.”
“Is it l’avin’ the country we are, thin?” asked Jerry, in a sympathetic voice.
“No, not exactly. You’ll stay here. But I cut sticks to-morrow.”
“Sure, then, it’s not alone ye’ll be goin’. Egor! man, didn’t I take me Bible-oath niver to l’ave yeh, the longest day ye lived? Ah—now, don’t be talkin’!”
“That’s all right, Jerry—but it’s got to be that way,” replied The O’Mahony, in low regretful tones. “I’ve figured it all out. It’ll be mighty tough to go off by myself without you, pard, but I can’t leave the thing without somebody to run it for me, and you are the only one that fills the bill. Now don’t kick about it, or make a fuss, or think I’m using you bad. Jest say to yourself—‘Now he’s my friend, an’ I’m his’n, and if he says I can be of most use to him here, why that settles it.’ Take the helm for a minute, Jerry. I want to go for’ard an’ say a word to the men.”
The O’Mahony looked down upon the unintelligible game being played with cards so dirty that he could not tell them apart, and worn by years of use to the shape of an egg, and waited with a musing smile on his face till the deal was exhausted. The players and onlookers formed a compact group at his knees, and they still sat or knelt or lounged on the deck as they listened to his words.
“Boys,” he said, in the gravely gentle tone which somehow he had learned in speaking to these men of Muirisc, “I’ve been tellin’ Jerry somethin’ that you’ve got a right to know, too. I’m goin’ to light out to-morrow—that is, quit Ireland for a spell. It may be for a good while—maybe not. That depends. I hate like the very devil to go—but it’s better for me to skip than to be lugged off to jail, and then to state’s prison—better for me an’ better for you. If I get out, the rest of you won’t be bothered. Now—hold on a minute till I git through!—now between us we’ve fixed up Muirisc so that it’s a good deal easier to live there than it used to be. There’ll be more mines opened up soon, an’ the lobster fact’ry an’ the fishin’ are on a good footin’ now. I’m goin’ to leave Jerry to keep track o’ things, along with O’Daly, an’ they’ll let me know regular how matters are workin’, so you won’t suffer by my not bein’ here.”
“Ah—thin—it’s our hearts ’ll be broken entirely wid the grief,” wailed Dominic, and the others, seizing this note of woe as their key, broke forth in a chorus of lamentation.
They scrambled to their feet with uncovered heads, and clustered about him, jostling one another for possession of his hands, and affectionately patting his shoulders and stroking his sleeves, the while they strove to express in their own tongue, or in the poetic phrases they had fashioned for themselves out of a practical foreign language, the sincerity of their sorrow. But the Irish peasant has been schooled through many generations to face the necessity of exile, and to view the breaking of households, the separation of kinsmen, the recurring miseries attendant upon an endless exodus across the seas, with the philosophy of the inevitable. None of these men dreamed of attempting to dissuade The O’Mahony from his purpose, and they listened with melancholy nods of comprehension when he had secured silence, and spoke again:
“You can all see that it’s got to be,” he said, in conclusion. “And now I want you to promise me this: I don’t expect you’ll have trouble with the police. They won’t get over from Balleydehob for another day or two—and by that time I shall be gone, and the Hen Hawk, too—an’ if they bring over the dingey I gave the Englishman to land in, why, of course there won’t be a man, woman or child in Muirisc that ever laid eyes on it before.”
“Sure, Heaven ’u’d blast the eyes that ’u’d recognize that same boat,” said one, and the others murmured their confidence in the hypothetical miracle.
“Well, then, what I want you to promise is this: That you’ll go on as you have been doin’, workin’ hard, keepin’ sober, an’ behavin’ yourselves, an’ that you’ll mind what Jerry says, same as if I said it myself. An’ more than that—an’ now this is a thing I’m specially sot on—that you’ll look upon that little gal, Kate O’Mahony, as if she was a daughter of mine, an’ watch over her, an’ make things pleasant for her, an’—an’ treat her like the apple of your eye.”
If there was an apple in The O’Mahony’s eye, it was for the moment hidden in a vail of moisture. The faces of the men and their words alike responded to his emotion.
Then one of them, a lean and unkempt old mariner, who even in this keen February air kept his hairy breast and corded, sunburnt throat exposed, and whose hawk-like eyes had flashed through fifty years of taciturnity over heaven knows what wild and fantastic dreams born of the sea, spoke up:
“Sir, by your l’ave, I’ll mesilf be her bodyguard and her servant, and tache her the wather as befits her blood, and keep the very sole of her fut from harrum.”
“Right you are, Murphy,” said The O’Mahony. “Make that your job.”
No one remembered ever having heard Murphy speak so much at one time before. To the surprise of the group, he had still more to say.
“And, sir—I’m not askin’ it be way of ricompinse,” the fierce-faced old boatman went on—“but w’u’d your honor grant us wan requist?”
“You’ve only got to spit ’er out,” was the hearty response.
“Thin, sir, give us over the man ye ’ve got down stairs.”
The O’Mahony’s face changed its expression. He thought for a moment; then asked:
“What to do?”
“To dale wid this night!” said Murphy, solemnly.
There was a pause of silence, and then the clamor of a dozen eager voices clashing one against the other in the cold wintry twilight:
“Give him over, O’Mahony!” “L’ave him to us!” “Don’t be soilin’ yer own hands wid the likes of him!” “Oh, l’ave him to us!” these voices pleaded.
The O’Mahony hesitated for a minute, then slowly shook his head.
“No, boys, don’t ask it,” he said. “I’d like to oblige you, but I can’t. He’s my meat—I can’t give him up!”
“W’u’d yer honor be for sparin’ him, thin?” asked one, with incredulity and surprise.
The O’Mahony of Muirisc looked over the excited group which surrounded him, dimly recognizing the strangeness of the weirdly interwoven qualities which run in the blood of Heber—the soft tenderness of nature which through tears would swear loyalty unto death to a little child, shifting on the instant to the ferocity of the wolf-hound burying its jowl in the throat of its quarry. Beyond them were gathering the sea mists, as by enchantment they had gathered ages before with vain intent to baffle the sons of Milesius, and faintly in the halflight lowered the beetling cliffs whereon The O’Mahonys, true sons of those sea-rovers, had crouched watching for their prey this thousand of years. He could almost feel the ancestral taste of blood in his mouth as he looked, and thought upon his answer.
“No, don’t worry about his gitting off,” he said, at last. “I ’ll take care of that. You’ll never see him again—no one on top of this earth ’ll ever lay eyes on him again.”
With visible reluctance the men forced themselves to accept this compromise. The Hen Hawk plunged doggedly along up the bay.
Three hours later, The O’Mahony and Jerry, not without much stumbling and difficulty, reached the strange subterranean chamber where they had found the mummy of the monk. They bore between them the inert body of a man, whose head was enveloped in bandages, and whose hands, hanging limp at arm’s length, were discolored with the grime and mold from the stony path over which they had dragged. They threw this burden on the mediaeval bed, and, drawing long breaths of relief, turned to light some candles in addition to the lantern Jerry had borne, and to kindle a fire on the hearth.
They talked in low murmurs meanwhile. The O’Mahony had told Jerry something of what part Linsky had played in his life. Jerry, without being informed with more than the general outlines of the story, was able swiftly to comprehend his master’s attitude toward the man—an attitude compounded of hatred for his treachery of to-day and gratitude of the services which he had unconsciously performed in the past. He understood to a nicety, too, what possibilities there were in the plan which The O’Mahony now unfolded to him, as the fire began crackling up the chimney.
“I can answer for his gittin’ over that crack in the head,” said The O’Mahony, heating and stirring a tin cup full of balsam over the flame. “Once I’ve fixed this bandage on, we can bring him to with ammonia and whisky, an’ give him some broth. He’ll live all right—an’ he’ll live right here, d’ye mind. Whatever else happens, he’s never to git outside, an’ he’s never to know where he is. Nobody but you is to so much as dream of his bein’ down here—be as mum as an oyster about it, won’t you? You’re to have sole charge of him, d’ye see—the only human being he ever lays eyes on.”
“Egor! I’ll improve his moind wid grand discourses on trayson and informin’ an’ betrayin’ his oath, and the like o’ that, till he’ll be fit to die wid shame.”
“No—I dunno—p’r’aps it’d be better not to let him know we know—jest make him think we’re his friends, hidin’ him away from the police. However, that can take care of itself. Say whatever you like to him, only—”
“Only don’t lay a hand on him—is it that ye were thinkin’?” broke in Jerry.
“Yes, don’t lick him,” said The O’Mahony. “He’s had about the worst bat on the head I ever saw a a man git an’ live, to start with. No—be decent with him, an’ give him enough to eat. Might let him have a moderate amount o’ drink, too.”
“I suppose there’ll be a great talk about his vanishin’ out o’ sight all at wance among the Brotherhood,” suggested Jerry.
“That don’t matter a darn,” said the other. “Jest you go ahead, an’ tend to your own knittin’, an’ let the Brotherhood whistle. We’ve paid a good stiff price to learn what Fenianism is worth, and we’ve learned enough. Not any more on my plate, thankee! Jest give the boys the word that the jig is up—that there won’t be any more drillin’ or meanderin’ round generally. And speakin’ o’ drink—”
A noise from the curtained bed in the alcove interrupted The O’Mahony’s remarks upon this important subject. Turning, the two men saw that Linsky had risen on the couch to a half-sitting posture, and, with a tremulous hand, drawing aside the felt-like draperies, was staring wildly at them out of blood-shot eyes.
“For the love of God, what is it?” he asked, in a faint and moaning voice.
“Lay down there!—quick!” called out The O’Mahony, sternly; and Linsky fell back prone without a protest.
The O’Mahony had finished melting his gum, and he spread it now salve-like upon a cloth. Then he walked over to where the wounded man lay, with marvel-stricken eyes wandering over the archaic vaulted ceiling.
“Is it dead I am?” he groaned, with a vacuous glance at the new-comer.
“No, you’ve been badly hurt in battle,” said the other, in curt tones. “We can pull you through, perhaps; but you’ve got to shut up an’ lay still. Hold your head this way a little more—that’s it.”
The injured man submitted to the operation, for the most part, with apparently closed eyes, but his next remark showed that he had been gathering his wits together.
“And how’s the battle gone, Captain Harrier?” he suddenly asked. “Is Oireland free from the oppressor at last?”
“No!” said The O’Mahony, with dry brevity—“but she’ll be free from you for a spell, or I miss my guess most consumedly.”