“Thank ye, gemmen, thank ye, and I shall not forget your hospitality.”
Pat rose, as if to depart.
“Mr. Patrick O’Brien, the choice of departure we give you is the choice of death!”
Pat’s heart sank within him, but he did not lose all his courage or presence of mind; and the latter quality suggested to him that he would try a little blarney.
“Why, gemmen, you wouldn’t kill a poor fellow in cold blood, would you?”
“No, Pat, no; and for that reason we have made you welcome to a drop, that you may not die a cold-blooded death. Draw swords!”
In an instant twenty sharp blades were unsheathed.
“Now, Mr. O’Brien, take your choice: shall every man have a cut at you—first a leg, then a hand, then an arm, and so on, until your head only shall remain—or will you be rolled up in a hammock for a sack, as your winding-sheet, and, well shotted, sink as a sailor to the bottom of those waters we have just quitted?”
“Thank your honour,” said the poor victim of their cruelty, “thank your honour; and of the two I had rather have neither.”
There was no smile upon any of the ferocious countenances around him, and Pat’s hopes of anything but cruelty forsook him. Just at this moment the bucket descended the well, and in came Will Laud, or Captain Laud, as he was called, who, acquainted with the fact of the Irishman’s descent (for he was the very person whom Pat had seen to make his exit, and had been informed by the woman of his being drowned), was a little relieved to see the man standing in the midst of his men unscathed.