‘Who knows him? who can identify him?’ asked Serasin.
‘I can say that his name is Dowall, and that he worked as a porter on the quay in this town when I was a boy,’ said a young Irishman who was copying letters and papers at a side-table. ‘Yes, Dowall,’ said the youth, confronting the look which the other gave him. ‘I am neither afraid nor ashamed to tell you to your face that I know you well, and who you are, and what you are.’
‘I’m an officer in the Irish Independent Army now,’ said Dowall resolutely. ‘To the divil I fling the French commission and all that belongs to it. Tisn’t troops that run and guns that burst we want. Let them go back again the way they came—we ‘re able for the work ourselves.*
Before I could translate this rude speech an officer broke into the room, with tidings that the streets had been cleared, and the rioters dispersed; a few prisoners, too, were taken, whose muskets bore trace of being recently discharged.
‘They fired upon our pickets, general,’ said the officer, whose excited look and voice betrayed how deeply he felt the outrage.
The men were introduced; three ragged, ill-looking wretches, apparently only roused from intoxication by the terror of their situation, for each was guarded by a soldier with a drawn bayonet in his hand.
‘We only obeyed ordhers, my lord; we only did what the captain tould us,’ cried they, in a miserable, whining tone, for the sight of their leader in captivity had sapped all their courage.
‘What am I here for? who has any business with me?’ said Dowall, assuming before his followers an attempt at his former tone of bully.
‘Tell him,’ said Serasin, ‘that wherever a French general stands in full command he will neither brook insolence nor insubordination. Let those fellows be turned out of the town, and warned never to approach the quarters of the army under any pretence whatever. As for this scoundrel, we’ll make an example of him. Order a peloton into the yard, and shoot him!’
I rendered this speech into English as the general spoke it, and never shall I forget the wild scream of the wretch as he heard the sentence.