Free A Passionate Girl by Thomas Fleming Page B

you.”
    â€œLovin’—me?” He shook his head. “You keep sayin’ that. You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. I haven’t got a dime, Bess. Girl like you—can get anyone she wants, almost.”
    â€œI’ve got the only one I want,” I said, putting my arms around him. His obsession with money, with his poverty, both touched and appalled me.
    At this moment bad fortune brought Michael into the cabin. “Excuse me,” he said with heavy sarcasm when he saw my arms around Dan.
    A lopsided grin on his face, Dan lurched to Michael and threw his arm around him. “I’m tryin’ to tell your crazy sister to stop lovin’ me. You agree?”
    â€œDefinitely,” Michael said.
    â€œWhaaat?” Dan said. “You jokin’?”
    â€œI am not,” Michael said, with a courage that was close to madness, considering Dan’s size and strength. “I’d like to see you part. I think you’re ill-matched.”
    The arm of friendship around Michael’s shoulder suddenly became a vise of rage. Dan seized the back of the collar of Michael’s shirt and flung him across the cabin. His head struck the wooden bulkhead with a sickening crack. Dan lunged after him, his fist held high.
    I caught his arm, crying, “He didn’t mean it, Dan.”
    He shook me off as if I were a fly, but I dodged past him and threw myself in front of Michael, who was crumpled against the wall, groaning and holding his head.
    â€œWill you strike me first?” I said.
    â€œWhat kind of a goddamn game are you two playin’ with me?” Dan snarled.
    For a moment I thought he might kill us both. I saw nothing but blind drunken hatred on his face. All trace of the buoyant, reckless warrior had vanished. He looked old, with his eyes squeezed and his mouth clenched; old or possessed of some evil spirit. I shuddered, remembering the curse the woman had laid on us at Priest’s Leap.
    â€œWe’re playing no game,” I said. “Go to bed now, and tomorrow we’ll laugh at it all. Michael spoke without thinking. It doesn’t alter in the least my feeling for you.”
    Two lies in one breath, I thought. But Dan lowered his fist, seized his bottle, and lurched out of the cabin onto the dark deck. I put Michael to bed with a cold cloth on his forehead and the next day forced him to shake hands with Dan. Neither displayed much enthusiasm for the gesture, but it was done in a manly way on both sides. I hoped that I had buried the enmity. It was just as well that I did not know it was a bitter seed and burying it meant only a later and more terrible harvest.
    The next day, we sighted several ships on the southern passage to the West Indies. Captain O’Hickey said it meant that we were drawing near New York. Dan began preparing a report of what he had found in his journey through Ireland. There was not much good news in it. Although the Fenians had been secretly organizing for three or four years, they did not have more than ten thousand members. The movement was built around the local circles led by a center. Many circles had lost membership recently. In some cases, the center himself had quit. Few of the circles had guns. When they met, they spent most of their time talking about revolution and little of it in drilling. What worried Dan most was the lack of strength in the countryside. The active circles were in cities like Limerick and Dublin. But Ireland was a country of villages. Most of the people lived upon the land. Dan lamented the crushed and fearful state of the peasantry, almost all of them terrified at the thought of arousing the landlord’s wrath.
    â€œI remember the stories my father told me about Mayo—the Molly Maguires had the whole county paralyzed,” Dan said. “Anyone who evicted a farmer or arrested a man for debt wound up with his throat cut or his cattle maimed. What happened to