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.
[Illustration: 0143]
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.