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.