Entering the tavern, he paused at the bar and asked for two small bottles of porter to be poured in one glass. Two or three men were loitering about the room, and he spoke just loud enough to make sure that all might hear him. Then, having drained the glass, and stood idly conversing for a minute or two with the woman at the bar, he made his way through a side door into the adjoining ball alley, where some young fellows of the neighborhood chanced to be engaged in a game.
He stood apart, watching their play, for only a few moments. Then one of the men whom he had seen but not looked closely at in the bar, came up to him, and said from behind, in an interrogative whisper:
“Yes,” said The O’Mahony, “Captain Harrier--” with a vague notion of having heard that voice before.
Then he turned, and in the straggling roof-light of the alley beheld the other’s face. It taxed to the utmost every element of self-possession in him to choke down the exclamation which sprang to his lips.
The man before him was Linsky!--Linsky risen from the dead, with the scarred gash visible on his throat, and the shifty blue-green eyes still bloodshot, and set with reddened eyelids in a freckled face.
“Yes--Captain--Harrier,” he repeated, lingering upon each word, as his brain fiercely strove to assert mastery over amazement, apprehension and perplexity.
The new-comer looked full into the The O’Mahony’s face without any sign whatever of recognition.
“Thin I’m to place mesilf at your disposal,” he said, briefly. “You know more of what’s in the air than I do, no doubt. Everything is arranged, I hear, for rising in both Cork an’ Tralee to-morrow, an’ in manny places in both counties besides. Officially, however, I know nothing of this--an’ have no right to know. I’m just to put mysilf at your command, and deliver anny messages you desire to sind to other cinters in your district. Here’s me papers.”
The O’Mahony barely glanced at the inclosures of the envelope handed him. They took the familiar form of a business letter of introduction, and a commercial contract, signed by a firm-name which to the uninitiated bore no significance. He noted that the name given was “Major Lynch.” He observed also, with satisfaction, that his hand, as it held the papers, was entirely steady. “Everybody’s been notified,” he said, after a time, instinctively assuming a slight hoarseness of speech. “I’ve been all over the ground, myself. You can meet me--let’s see--say at the bottom of the black rock jest overlookin’ the marteller tower at----at eleven o’clock, sharp, to-morrow forenoon. The rocks behind the tower, mind--t’other side of the coast-guard houses. You’ll see me land from my boat.”