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.”