“Such is the rumour; but there's no truth in it: the people hold back, and give this as the excuse for their cowardice. The priests will not harangue them, and the panic spreads every moment wider, of treachery and betrayal. Lanty Lawler, the fellow who should have supplied horses for the artillery, is an informer; so are half the others. There's nothing for it but a bold plunge—something to put every neck in the halter, and then will come the spirit to meet all difficulties—so thinks Tone, and he's a noble-hearted fellow, and ready for any peril.”
A loud knocking at the door of the tower now broke in upon the converse, and Kerry O'Leary called aloud—
“Open the door, Master Mark; be quick, the soldiers is comin'.”
Mark speedily withdrew the heavy table from its place across the door, and opened it. Kerry, his clothes reduced to rags, and his face and hands bleeding, stood before him, terror in every feature. “They took me prisoner at the gate there, but I contrived to slip away, and took to the mountain, and a fine chase they gave me for the last hour——”
“But the soldiers—where are they, and in what place?”
“There's two troops of horse about a mile below Mary's in the glen, waiting for Hemsworth's orders to advance.”
“Go on,” said Mark, with a stern smile; “they're not likely to move for some time.”
“I do not know that, then,” said Kerry, “for I saw Hemsworth pass up the road, with two men holding him on his horse; he seemed to have got a bad fall, for the blood was running down his face, and his cheeks was as pale as a corpse.”
“You saw Hemsworth, and he was living!”
“Faix he was, and no doubt of it; there never was the man in these parts could curse and swear the way he does, barrin' himself, and I heerd him blasphaming away as he went along what he wouldn't do down here.”