Now for it! With eager expectation we awaited the men who were to meet us here, and on whom it now depended whether our mission should be carried to a successful issue. For the last half hour we had had hanging from our bridge-rail the signal agreed upon with Casement. Now with the naked eye, and now with our glasses, we scanned the surroundings. Nothing to be seen. Nothing moving in any direction. Not a boat on the water or any sign of life. The whole neighbourhood seemed to be dead. As there was no appreciable current here in the inner part of the bay, I lay to temporarily with the engines stopped. When another ten minutes had elapsed and still nothing was to be seen, I began to feel a little uneasy. A quarter of an hour went by, and from moment to moment our anxiety increased. We waited and waited with beating hearts, silently hoping that the next few seconds would see our wishes fulfilled. In vain. The stillness remained absolute. Slowly the minutes slid away. The half-hour's grace agreed upon was nearly up. I got out my secret orders and read them through once more. There could be no doubt; I was at the right spot, and exactly at the right time. But where were the Irish? My orders were, 'If, after half an hour's wait, none of the aforesaid vessels or persons are at the rendezvous, and there does not appear to be any possibility of communicating with them, you are to use your own judgment as to whether to proceed in or to turn back.' The half-hour was up. I considered for a few moments what I should do. Turn back? No. Under no circumstances would I give up the game, so long as any possibility remained of carrying out a landing. But how to carry it out? To run in in full daylight, without having established communication with Casement or any of his people would be foolish. I might just as well make the English a present of the munitions. Another point was that the channel beside the pier was only six feet deep at low tide, so that, if I were obliged to blow up the ship to prevent her falling into the hands of the enemy, hardly half of her hull would be under water! It looked, too, as if something had gone wrong. On the slopes of Kerry Head, the northern buttress of Tralee Bay, and in several other places, clouds of smoke were rising from the hills. Could these be warnings intended for us? But if so, where the deuce were the men who had lit them? My whole crew had, in the meantime, gathered on deck, and as we were all taking the same risk, I had the whole ship's company up to the bridge to confer on the situation. To my delight none of them thought of turning back so long as there was any hope whatever of carrying out our mission. As we talked things over we came more and more to the conclusion that the English had got wind of our enterprise.