What interested them considerably more was the report, confirmed now by O’Daly himself, that just before the crash came, six people in the reception hall of the convent had distinctly heard the voice of the Hostage from the depths below the cloistral building. Everybody in Muirisc knew all about the Hostage. They had been, so to speak, brought up with him. Prolonged familiarity with the pathetic story of his death in exile, here at Muirisc, and constant contact with his name as perpetuated in the title of their unique convent, made him a sort of oldest inhabitant of the place. Their lively imaginations now quickly built up and established the belief that he was heard to complain, somewhere under the convent, once every fifty years. Old Ellen Dumphy was able to fix the period with exactness because when the mysterious sound was last heard she was a young woman, and had her face bound up, and was almost “disthracted wid the sore teeth.” But most interesting of all was the fact that there, before their eyes, riding easily upon the waters of the Muirisc, lay the _Hen Hawk_, as peacefully and safely at anchor as if no gale had ever thundered upon the cliffs outside. The four men of her crew, when they made their belated appearance in the morning sunlight out-of-doors, were eagerly questioned, and they told with great readiness and a flowering wealth of adjectives the marvelous story of how The O’Mahony aimed her in pitch darkness at the bar, and hurled her over it at precisely the psychological moment, with just the merest scraping of her keel. To the seafaring senses of those who stood now gazing at the vessel there was more witchcraft in this than in the subterranean voice of the Hostage even. “Ah, thin, ’tis our O’Mahony’s the grand divil of a man!” they murmured, admiringly. No work was to be expected, clearly, on the day after such an achievement as this. The villagers stood about, and looked at the squat coaster, snugly raising and sinking with the lazy movement of the tide, and watched for the master of Muirisc to show himself. They had never before been conscious of such perfect pride in and affection for this strange Americanized chieftain of theirs. By an unerring factional instinct, they felt that this apotheosis of The O’Mahony in their hearts involved the discomfiture of O’Daly and the nuns, and they let the hereditary bard feel it, too. “Ah, now, Cormac O’Daly,” one of the women called out to the poet, as he hung, black-visaged and dejected, upon the skirts of the group, “tell me man, was it anny of yer owld Diarmids and Cathals ye do be perplexin’ us wid that wud a-steered that boat beyond over the bar at black midnight, wid a gale outside fit to blow mountains into the say? Sure, it’s not botherin’ his head wid books, or delutherin’ his moind wid ancestral mummeries, or wearyin’ the bones an’ marrow out of the saints wid attendin’ their business instead of his own, that _our_ O’Mahony do be after practicin’.”