They began to talk of what had caused the wind. "It was the blessed St. Patrick," said Corkell. St. Patrick was the patron saint of that sea, and Corkell was more than half a Catholic, his mother being a fish-wife from Kinsale.
"Saint Patrick be ——," cried Ned Teare, with a scornful laugh, and they got to words and at length almost to blows.
Old Quilleash was at the tiller. "Drop it," he shouted, "we're in the down stream for Contrary, and we'll be in harbor in ten minutes."
"God A'mighty! it's running a ten-knots tide," said Teare.
In less than ten minutes they were sailing under the castle islet up to the wooden pier, having been eighteen hours on the water.
Not a man of the four had given a thought to Dan, whether he wished to go back to the island, or to make a foreign port where his name and his crime would be unknown. Only the lad Davy had hung about him where he sat by the hatches. Dan's pale face was firm and resolute, and the dream of a smile was on his hard-drawn lips. But his despair had grown into courage, and he knew no fear at all.
The sun was down, the darkness was gathering, and through the day-mist the dew fog was rising as the fishing-boat put to under the lee of a lantern newly lighted, that was stuck out from the end of the pier on a pole. The quay was almost deserted. Only the old harbor-master was there, singing out, as by duty bound, his lusty oaths at their lumberings. Never before did the old grumbler's strident voice sound so musical as now, and even his manifest ill-temper was sweet to-night, for it seemed to tell the men that thus far they were not suspected.
The men went their way together, and Dan went off alone. He took the straightest course home. Seven long miles over a desolate road he tramped in the darkness and never a star came out, and the moon, which was in its last quarter, struggling behind a rack of cloud, lightened the sky sometimes, but did not appear. As he passed through Michael he noticed, though his mind was preoccupied and his perception obscure, that the street was more that usually silent, and that few lights burned behind the window-blinds. Even the low porch of the "Three Legs," when Dan came to it, was deserted, and hardly the sound of a voice came from within the little pot-house. Only in a vague way did these impressions communicate themselves to Dan's stunned intelligence as he plodded along, but hardly had he passed out of the street when he realized the cause of the desolation. A great glow came from a spot in front of him, as of many lanterns and torches burning together, and though in his bewilderment he had not noticed it before, the lights lit all the air about them. In the midst of these lights there came and went out of the darkness the figures of a great company of people, sometimes bright with the glare on their faces, sometimes black with the deep shadow of the torchlight.
Obscure as his ideas were, Dan comprehended everything in an instant, and, chilled as he was to the heart's core by the terrors of the last night and day, his very bones seemed now to grow cold within him.
It was a funeral by torchlight, and these maimed rites were, by an ancient usage, long disused, but here revived, the only burial of one whose death had been doubtful, or whose body had washed ashore on the same day.