And it was this vague, unhappy mistrust that the I. A.
A. were labouring to produce.
"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.
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