“Well,” he said, “when I heard it was gunrunning I simply jumped at the chance. Any fellow would. I said I’d start right away, if he liked. As a matter of fact, we didn’t start for nearly a fortnight. The boat turned out to be the Pegeen. You know the Pegeen, don’t you?”
I did not. I am not a sailor, and except that I cannot help seeing paragraphs about Shamrock IV. in the daily papers I do not think I know the name of a single yacht.
“Well,” said Sam, “she’s O’Meara’s boat I’ve sailed in her sometimes in cruiser races. She’s slow and never does any good, but she’s a fine sea boat. My idea was that Hazlewood had hired her, and I didn’t find out till after we had started that O’Meara was on board. That surprised me a bit, for O’Meara goes in for being rather an extreme kind of Nationalist—not the sort of fellow you’d expect to be running guns for Carson and the Ulster Volunteers. However, I was jolly glad to see him. He crawled out of the cabin when we were a couple of miles out of the harbour, and by that time I’d have been glad to see anyone who knew one end of the boat from the other. Old Hazlewood was all right; but the other three men were simply rotters, the sort of fellows who’d be just as likely as not to take a pull on a topsail halyard when told to slack away the lee runner. I was just making up my mind to work the boat single-handed when O’Meara turned up. There was a middling fresh breeze from the west, and we were going south on a reach. I didn’t get much chance of a talk with O’Meara because he was in one watch and I in the other—had to be, of course, on account of being the only two who knew anything about working the boat. I did notice, though, that when he spoke to Hazlewood he called him Cassidy. However, that was no business of mine. We sailed pretty nearly due south that day and the next, and the next after that. Then we hove to.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Ask me another,” said Sam. “I told you I couldn’t navigate. I hadn’t an idea within a hundred miles where we were. What’s more, I didn’t care. I was having a splendid time, and had succeeded in knocking some sort of sense into the other fellow in my watch. Hazlewood steered, and barring that he was sea-sick for eight hours, my man turned out to be a decent sort, and fairly intelligent. He said his name was Temple, but Hazlewood called him O’Reilly as often as not.”
“You seem to have gone in for a nice variety of names,” I said. “What did you call yourself?”
“I stuck to my own name, of course. I wasn’t doing anything to be ashamed of. If we’d been caught and the thing had turned out to be a crime—I don’t know whether it was or not, but if it was, I suppose———”
“I suppose I should have paid your fine,” I said.
“Thanks,” said Sam. “Thanks, awfully. I rather expected you would whenever I thought about that part of it, but I very seldom did.”
“What happened when you lay to?”