The Wild Geese

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Weyman Stanley John. The Wild Geese

CHAPTER I. ON BOARD THE "CORMORANT" SLOOP

CHAPTER II. MORRISTOWN

CHAPTER III. A SCION OF KINGS

CHAPTER IV "STOP THIEF!"

CHAPTER V. THE MESS-ROOM AT TRALEE

CHAPTER VI. THE MAÎTRE D'ARMES

CHAPTER VII. BARGAINING

CHAPTER VIII. AN AFTER-DINNER GAME

CHAPTER IX. EARLY RISERS

CHAPTER X. A COUNCIL OF WAR

CHAPTER XI. A MESSAGE FOR THE YOUNG MASTER

CHAPTER XII. THE SEA MIST

CHAPTER XIII. A SLIP

CHAPTER XIV. THE COLONEL'S TERMS

CHAPTER XV. FEMINA FURENS

CHAPTER XVI. THE MARPLOT

CHAPTER XVII. THE LIMIT

CHAPTER XVIII. A COUNTERPLOT

CHAPTER XIX. PEINE FORTE ET DURE

CHAPTER XX. AN UNWELCOME VISITOR

CHAPTER XXI. THE KEY

CHAPTER XXII. THE SCENE IN THE PASSAGE

CHAPTER XXIII. BEHIND THE YEWS

CHAPTER XXIV. THE PITCHER AT THE WELL

CHAPTER XXV. PEACE

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It was not until the Colonel had passed over the shoulder above the stone-walled house that he escaped from the jabber of the crowd and the jeers of the younger members of this savage tribe, who, noting something abnormal in the fashion of the stranger's clothes, followed him a space. On descending the farther slope, however, he found himself alone in the silence of the waste. Choosing without hesitation one of two tracks, ill-trodden, but such as in that district and at that period passed for roads, he took his way along it at a good pace.

A wide brown basin, bog for the most part, but rising here and there into low mounds of sward or clumps of thorn-trees, stretched away to the foot of the hills. He gazed upon it with eyes which had been strained for years across the vast unbroken plains of Central Europe, the sandy steppes of Poland, the frozen marshes of Lithuania; and beside the majesty of their boundless distances this view shrank to littleness. But it spoke to more than his eyes; it spoke to the heart, to feelings and memories which time had not blunted, nor could blunt. The tower on the shoulder behind him had been raised by his wild forefathers in the days when the Spaniard lay at Smerwick; and, mean and crumbling, still gave rise to emotions which the stern battlements of Stralsund or of Rostock had failed to evoke. Soil and sky, the lark which sang overhead, the dark peat-water which rose under foot, the scent of the moist air, the cry of the curlew, all spoke of home – the home which he had left in the gaiety of youth, to return to it a grave man, older than his years, and with grey hairs flecking the black. No wonder that he stood more than once, and, absorbed in thought, gazed on this or that, on crag and moss, on the things which time and experience had so strangely diminished.

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"It's easiness has been my ruin, and faith! it's too late to change."

"Then I?"

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