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.
0151
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 ............