The Return of the O'Mahony. Frederic Harold
don’t know if I can. I haven’t tried that same yet.”
A long silence ensued, Zeke squatting on a cracker-box beside the fire, flask in hand, Linsky concentrating his attention upon the warmth at the soles of his feet, and drowsily mixing up the Galtee Mountains with the fire-crowned hills of a strange, new world, upon one of which he lay. Then all at once he was conscious that Zeke had crept into the tent, and was lying curled close beside him, and that the fire outside had sunk to a mass of sparkless embers. He half rose from his recumbent posture before these things displaced his dreams; then, as he sank back again, and closed his eyes to settle once more into sleep, Zeke spoke:
“Don’t do that again! You got to lie still here, or you’ll bust the hull combination. If you want to turn over, tell me, and we’ll flop together—otherwise you’ll have the thing down on our heads.” There came another pause, and Linsky almost believed himself to be asleep again. But Zeke was wakeful.
“Say, Irish,” he began, “that country of yourn must be a pretty tough place, if this kind of thing strikes you fellows as an improvement on it.”
“Sur,” said Linsky, with sleepy dignity, “ther’s no other counthry on earth fit to buckle Ireland’s shoe’s—no offence to you.”
“Yes, you always give us that; but if it’s so fine a place, why in———don’t you stay there? What do you all pile over here for?”
“I came to America on business,” replied Linsky, stiffly.
“Business of luggin’ bricks up a ladder!”
“Sur, I’m a solicitor’s clark.”
“How do you mean—‘Clark?’ Thought your name was Linsky?”
“It’s what you call ‘clurk’—a lawyer’s clurk—and I’ll be a lawyer mesilf, in toime.”
“That’s worse still. There’s seven hundred times as many lawyers here already as anybody wants.”
“I had no intintion of stoppin’. My business was to foind a certain man, the heir to a great estate in Ireland, and thin to returrun; but I didn’t foind my man—and—sure, it’s plain enough I didn’t returrun, ayether; and I’ll go to sleep now, I’m thinkin’.” Zeke paid no attention to the hint.
“Go on,” he said. “Why didn’t you go back, Irish?”
“It’s aisy enough,” Linsky replied, with a sigh. “Tin long weeks was I scurryin’ from wan ind of the land to the other, lukkin’ for this invisible divil of a Hugh O’Mahony”—Zeke stretched out his feet here with a sudden movement, unnoted by the other—“makin’ inquiries here, foindin’ traces there, gettin’ laughed at somewhere else, till me heart was broke entoirely. ‘He’s in the army,’ says they. ‘Whereabouts?’ says I. Here, there, everwhere they sint me on a fool’s errand. Plintv of places I came upon where he had been, but divil a wan where he was; and thin I gave it up and wint to New York to sail, and there I made some fri’nds, and wint out wid ’em and they spoke fair, and I drank wid ’em, and, faith, whin I woke I was a soldier, wid brass buttons on me and a gun; and that’s the truth of it—worse luck! And now I’ll sleep!”
“And this Hugh What-d’ye-call-him—the fellow you was huntin’ after—where did he live before the war?”
“ ’Twas up in New York State—a place they call Tecumsy—he’d been a shoemaker there for years. I have here among me papers all they know about him and his family there. It wan’t much, but it makes his identity plain, and that’s the great thing.”
“And what d’ye reckon has become of him?”
“If ye ask me in me capacity as solicitor’s clark, I’d say that, for purposes of law, he’d be aloive till midsummer day next, and thin doy be process of statutory neglict, and niver know it as long as he lives; but if you ask me proivate opinion, he’s as dead as a mackerel; and, if he isn’t, he will be in good toime, and divil a ha’porth of shoe-leather will I waste more on him. And now good-noight to ye, sur!”
Linsky fell to snoring before any reply came. Zeke had meant to tell him that they were to rise at three and set out upon a venturesome vidette-post expedition together. He wondered now what it was that had prompted him to select this raw and undrilled Irishman as his comrade in the enterprise which lay before him. Without finding an answer, his mind wandered drowsily to another question—Ought O’Mahony to be told of the search for him or not? That vindictive and sullen Hughie should be heir to anything seemed an injustice to all good fellows; but heir to what Linsky called a great estate!—that was ridiculous! What would an ignorant cobbler like him do with an estate?
Zeke was not quite clear in his mind as to what an “estate” was, but obviously it must be something much too good for O’Mahony. And why, sure enough! Only a fortnight before, while they were still at Fort Davis, this O’Mahony had refused to mend his boot for him, even though his frost-bitten toes had pushed their way to the daylight between the sole and upper. Zeke could feel the toes ache perceptibly as he thought on this affront. Sleepy as he was, it grew apparent to him that O’Mahony would probably never hear of that inheritance; and then he went off bodily into dream-land, and was the heir himself, and violently resisted O’Mahony’s attempts to dispossess him, and—and then it was three o’clock, and the sentry was rolling him to and fro on the ground with his foot to wake him.
“Sh-h! Keep as still as you can,” Zeke admonished the bewildered Linsky, when he, too, had been roused to consciousness. “We mustn’t stir up the camp.”
“Is it desertin’ ye are?” asked the Irishman, rubbing his eyes and sitting upright.
“Sh-h! you fool—no! Feel around for your gun and knapsack and cap, and bring ’em out,” whispered Zeke from the door of the tent.
Linsky obeyed mechanically, groping in the utter darkness for what seemed to him an age, and then crawling awkwardly forth. As he rose to his feet, he could hardly distinguish his companion standing beside him. Only faint, dusky pillars of smoke, reddish at the base, gray above, rising like slenderest palms to fade in the obscurity overhead, showed where the fires in camp had been. The clouded sky was black as ink.
“Fill your pockets with cartridges,” he heard Zeke whisper. “We’ll prob’ly have to scoot for our lives. We don’t want no extra load of knapsacks.”
It strained Linsky’s other perceptions even more than it did his sight to follow his comrade in the tramp which now began. He stumbled over roots and bushes, sank knee-deep in swampy holes, ran full tilt into trees and fences, until it seemed to him they must have traveled miles, and he could hardly drag one foot after the other. The first shadowy glimmer of dawn fell upon them after they had accomplished a short but difficult descent from the ridge and stood at its foot, on the edge of a tiny, alder-fringed brook. The Irishman sat down on a fallen log for a minute to rest; the while Zeke, as fresh and cool as the morning itself, glanced critically about him.
“Yes, here we are,” he said as last. “We can strike through here, get up the side hill, and sneak across by the hedge into the house afore it’s square daylight. Come on, and no noise now!”
Linsky took up his gun and followed once more in the other’s footsteps as well as might be. The growing light from the dull-gray east made it a simpler matter now to get along, but he still stumbled so often that Zeke cast warning looks backward upon him more than once. At last they reached the top of the low hill which had confronted them.
It was near enough to daylight for Linsky to see, at the distance of an eighth of a mile, a small, red farm-house, flanked by a larger barn. A tolerably straight line of thick hedge ran from close by where they stood, to within a stone’s throw of the house. All else was open pasture and meadow land.
“Now bend your back,” said Zeke. “We’ve got to crawl along up this side of the fence till we git opposite that house, and then, somehow or other, work across to it without bein’ seen.”