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.
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.
