It did not take Larry long to determine what course to take with the Secret Service agent, and he had decided on the same fate for Micky Fee, when he suddenly realised that his prayers had been answered. His quick brain began to work out how many rifles, machine-guns, automatics, and bombs Fee’s father would value the life of his only child at; the more he thought of it, the higher he made the figures.
Micky had been on a visit to his grandparents in Ballybor for some months past, and had taken an active interest in the Volunteers. About 2 A.M. the next morning there came a loud knock at the grandparents’ house. When the old man opened the door he found himself looking into the muzzles of a ring of guns, and in a few minutes Master Micky left for an unknown destination.
About a fortnight later Michael Fee and his wife received the shock of their lives when they opened their letters at breakfast one morning. Among Fee’s was one bearing the Ballybor postmark, which stated briefly that his son had been tried by a court-martial of the I.R.A. on a charge of giving information to the enemy and condemned to death, and that the sentence would be duly carried out unless Michael Fee presented so many rifles, pistols, machine-guns, bombs, and ammunition to the I.R.A.
The letter also stated that Mr Fee’s answer was to be sent to a named Sinn Fein agent in New York within seven days of the receipt of the letter, who would give him a time-limit for handing over the arms, and would also tell him where the arms were to be landed. A P.S. was added suggesting that Fee should bring the arms to Ireland in a yacht, and that he would be able to take his son back to the States in her.
For many months the Irish papers had been full of accounts of men taken from their beds in the dead of night and executed outside their homes by armed and masked men; also of the bodies of missing men being found in a field, days after they had disappeared, riddled with bullets. Some of the Irish newspapers tried to throw the blame for these murders on the forces of the Crown by saying that the men wore “trench coats,” but never adding that practically every young man in Ireland nowadays wears a so-called trench-coat.
Fee knew that many of these murders were “executions” of men who had given information to the police, and the thought that one morning at breakfast he or his wife might open an Irish paper to read an account of the finding of their son’s body riddled with bullets, caused him to break out into a cold sweat. Being a good business man, Fee made up his mind at once, and that evening found him in New York making arrangements with the Sinn Fein agent for the immediate shipment of the arms to Ireland.
It’s one thing to talk of smuggling arms into Ireland, but quite another story to accomplish it. To the Irish peasant, who has never been outside his own country, it looks as easy as falling off a log; but then he has no idea of the power of the British Navy, and the British Government does not take the trouble to inform an Irish peasant that it has the finest navy in the world—he is supposed to know this, or to find it out for himself.
When Fee asked the agent for his suggestions, the agent trotted out the usual stock dodges—packing rifles in piano-frames, S.A.A. in bags of flour, and more equally futile plans, and he quickly realised that the man was a fool, so left him and retired to his room in the hotel to think out a plan for himself.
For a long time he could think of nothing but the picture of his son’s body lying in a vivid green field in his native land: he could even see the clothes Micky was wearing, and the dirty white handkerchief (he was quite sure it would be dirty) over his eyes. For hours his mind dwelt on this picture, but in the end he gained control over himself, and before he turned in his brain had evolved a sound plan of action, and with an Irishman’s sanguine temperament he fell asleep, thinking that his boy was as good as at home already.
The following morning Fee went to a big yacht agent, but found that he had only a steam yacht for charter. He explained that he wanted a motor yacht big enough to cross the Atlantic, and the man referred him to a firm of builders who had a yacht of this description, which he believed was on the verge of completion.