t of his desolation
and bewilderment, the door opened and Dirty Dan O'Leary presented
himself.

XXIX

Thanks to the constitution of a Nubian lion, Dirty Dan's wounds and
contusions had healed very rapidly and after he got out of hospital,
he spent ten days in recuperating his sadly depleted strength. His
days he spent in the sunny lee of a lumber pile in the drying-yard,
where, in defiance of the published ordinance, he smoked plug tobacco
and perused the _Gaelic American_.

Now, Mr. O'Leary, as has been stated earlier in this chronicle, was
bad black Irish. Since the advent of Oliver Cromwell into Ireland, the
males of every generation of the particular tribe of O'Leary to which
Dirty Dan belonged had actively or passively supported the battles of
Ould Ireland against the hereditary enemy across the Channel, and
Dirty Dan had suckled this holy hatred at his mother's breast;
wherefore he regarded it in the light of his Christian duty to keep
that hate alive by subscribing to the _Gaelic American_ and believing
all he read therein anent the woes of the Emerald Isle. Mr. O'Leary
was also a member of an Irish-American revolutionary society, and was
therefore aware that presently his kind of Irish were to rise, cast
off their shackles (and, with the help o' God and the German kaiser)
proclaim the Irish Republic.

For several months past, Daniel's dreams had dwelt mostly with
bayonet-practice. Ordinary bayonets, however, were not for him. He
dreamed his trusty steel was as long as a cross-cut saw, and nightly
he skewered British soldiers on it after the fashion of kidneys and
bacon _en brochette_. For two months he had been saving his money
toward a passage home to Ireland and the purchase of a rifle and two
thousand rounds of ammunition--soft-nose bullets preferred--with the
pious intention of starting with "th' bhoys" at the very beginning and
going through with them to the bloody and triumphant finish.

Unfortunately for Dirty Dan, his battle in defense of Donald McKaye
had delayed his sortie to the fields of martyrdom. On the morning that
Nan Brent left Port Agnew, however, fortune had again smiled upon The
O'Leary. Meeting Judge Moore, who occupied two local offices--justice
of the peace and coroner--upon the street, that functionary had
informed Dan that the public generally, and he and the town marshal in
particular, traced an analogy between the death of the mulatto in
Darrow and Mr. O'Leary's recent s