Some further directions in detail followed, and then the bulk of the canvas was struck, and the vessel hove to. The small boat was drawn to the side, and the landing party descended to it. One of their own number took the oars, for it was intended to keep the boat in waiting on the beach. Their guns lay in the bottom, and they were conscious of a novel weight of ammunition in their pockets. They waved their hands in salution to the friends and neighbors they were leaving, and then, with a vigorous sweep of the oars, the boat went tossing on her course to the barren, rocky shore.
The O’Mahony, curled up on the seat at the bow, scanned the wide prospect with a roving scrutiny. No sail was visible on the whole horizon. A drab, hazy stain over the distant sky-line told only that the track of the great Atlantic steamers lay outward many miles. On the land side—where rough, blackened boulders rose in ugly points from the lapping water, as outposts to serried ranks of lichened rocks which, in their turn, straggled backward in slanting ascent to the summit, masked by shaggy growths of furze—no token of human life was visible.
A landing-place was found, and the boat securely drawm up on shore beyond highwater mark. Then The O’Mahony led the way, gun in hand, across the slippery reach of wet sea-weed, and thence, by winding courses, obliquely up the hillside. He climbed from crag to crag with the agility of a goat, but the practiced Muirisc men kept close at his heels.
Arrived at the top, he paused in the shelter of the furze bushes to study the situation.
It was a great and beautiful panorama upon which he looked meditatively down. The broad bay lay proudly in the arms of an encircling wall of cliffs, whose terraced heights rose and spread with the dignity of some amphitheatre of the giants. At their base, the blue waters broke in a caressing ripple of cream-like foam; afar off, the sunshine crowned their purple heads with a golden haze. Through the center of this noble sweep of sheltering hills cleft the wooded gorge of a river, whose mouth kissed the strand in the screening shadow of a huge mound, reared precipitously above the sea-front, but linked by level stretches of sward to the mainland behind. On the summit of this mound, overlooking the bay, was one of those curious old martello towers with which England marked the low comedy stage of her panic about Bonaparte’s invasion.
The tower—a squat, circular stone fort, with a basement for magazine purposes, and an upper story for defensive operations—kept its look-out for Corsican ghosts in solitude. Considerably to this side, on the edge of the cliff, was a white cluster of coast-guard houses, in the yard of which two or three elderly men in sailor attire could be seen sunning themselves. Away in the distance, on the farther bend of the bay, the roofs and walls of a cluster of cottages were visible, and above these, among the trees, scattered glimpses of wealthier residences.
Of all this vast spectacle The O’Mahony saw nothing but the martello tower, and the several approaches to it past the coast-guard houses. He chose the best of these, and led the way, crouching low behind the line of hedges, until the whole party halted in the cover of a clump of young sycamores, upon the edge of the open space leading to the mound. A hundred feet away from them, at the base of a jagged bowlder of black slatish substance, stood a man, his face turned toward the tower and the sea. It was Linsky.