‘Sheer waste of breath,’ said the second man after a pause in the council, ’I don’t see the use of tampering with their fool-army, but it has been tried before and we must try it again.  It looks well in the reports.  If we send one man from here you may bet your life that other men are going too.  Order up Mulcahy.’

They ordered him up—­a slim, slight, dark-haired young man, devoured with that blind rancorous hatred of England that only reaches its full growth across the Atlantic.  He had sucked it from his mother’s breast in the little cabin at the back of the northern avenues of New York; he had been taught his rights and his wrongs, in German and Irish, on the canal fronts of Chicago; and San Francisco held men who told him strange and awful things of the great blind power over the seas.  Once, when business took him across the Atlantic, he had served in an English regiment, and being insubordinate had suffered extremely.  He drew all his ideas of England that were not bred by the cheaper patriotic prints from one iron-fisted colonel and an unbending adjutant.  He would go to the mines if need be to teach his gospel.  And he went as his instructions advised p.d.q.—­which means ’with speed’—­to introduce embarrassment into an Irish regiment, ’already half-mutinous, quartered among Sikh peasantry, all wearing miniatures of His Highness Dhulip Singh, Maharaja of the Punjab, next their hearts, and all eagerly expecting his arrival.’  Other information equally valuable was given him by his masters.  He was to be cautious, but never to grudge expense in winning the hearts of the men in the regiment.  His mother in New York would supply funds, and he was to write to her once a month.  Life is pleasant for a man who has a mother in New York to send him two hundred pounds a year over and above his regimental pay.

In process of time, thanks to his intimate knowledge of drill and musketry exercise, the excellent Mulcahy, wearing the corporal’s stripe, went out in a troopship and joined Her Majesty’s Royal Loyal Musketeers, commonly known as the ‘Mavericks,’ because they were masterless and unbranded cattle-sons of small farmers in County Clare, shoeless vagabonds of Kerry, herders of Bally-vegan, much wanted ‘moonlighters’ from the bare rainy headlands of the south coast, officered by O’Mores, Bradys, Hills, Kilreas, and the like.  Never to outward seeming was there more promising material to work on.  The First Three had chosen their regiment well.  It feared nothing that moved or talked save the colonel and the regimental Roman Catholic chaplain, the fat Father Dennis, who held the keys of heaven and hell, and blared like an angry bull when he desired to be convincing.  Him also it loved because on occasions of stress he was used to tuck up his cassock and charge with the rest into the merriest of the fray, where he always found, good man, that the saints sent him a revolver when there was a fallen private to be protected, or—­but this came as an afterthought—­his own gray head to be guarded.