The Great Captain: A Story of the Days of Sir Walter Raleigh

THE GREAT CAPTAIN.
A STORY OF THE DAYS OF SIR WALTER RALEIGH.
KATHARINE TYNAN HINKSON,
Author of “The Golden Lily,” “The Queen’s Page,” “Her Father’s Daughter,” etc.
New York, Cincinnati, Chicago:
BENZIGER BROTHERS,
Publishers of Benziger’s Magazine
Copyright, 1902, by Benziger Brothers.
Printed in the United States of America
I never knew my father and mother, having been born into a time like that of the great desolation foretold by the Scriptures. They were the days of what I have heard called the Rebellion of the Desmonds, when that great league was made against the power of Eliza, the English Queen, by the Irish princes, which went down in a red sunset of death and blood. Indeed I myself had starved, like other innocents, on the breasts of their dead mothers, had it not been for the pity of him I must ever regard as the greatest of Englishmen, albeit no friend, but rather the spoiler, of those of my blood and faith.
It was indeed while the end was not yet quite determined, for although Sir James Desmond, the wisest and most skilled of their generals in the art of war, was dead, there was yet the Seneschal of Imokilly and other Geraldine lords fighting for their inheritance and their country. It was on a day when Sir Walter Raleigh with a handful of troopers was returning from a visit to the Lord Deputy at Dublin that he found me. He had expected no ambush, and rode slowly, being fatigued by his journey, through the great woods to the Ford of the Kine. Now the woods covered many dead and dying, and as the Captain rode at the head of his men I came running from the undergrowth, a lusty and fearless lad of three, and held up my hands to the foremost rider. I had as like as not been spitted on a trooper’s sword but that the Captain himself, leaning from his horse, swung me to his saddle-bow.
He had perhaps a thought of his own little Wat, by his mother’s knee in an English pleasaunce, for, as I have heard since, he talked with me and provoked me to confidence. Nor was I slow to answer all he asked, being a bright and bold child, which perhaps was the saving of me, since I flung an arm round the great Captain’s steel-clad neck, and perched by him as bold as any robin that is housed in the frost.