"It's not fitting, you a Calhoun of Playmore!" Christopher answered.

"Well, then, list to me," said Dyck, for he saw the men could not bear
his new democracy. "I'm hungry. In four years I haven't had a meal that
came from the right place or went to the right spot. Is the little
tavern, the Hen and Chickens, on the Liffeyside, still going? I mean the
place where the seamen and the merchant-ship officers visit."

Michael nodded.

"Well, look you, Michael--get you both there, and order me as good a meal
of fish and chops and baked pudding as can be bought for money. Aye, and
I'll have a bottle of red French wine, and you two will have what you
like best. Mark me, we'll sit together there, for we're one of a kind.
I've got to take to a life that fits me, an ex-jailbird, a man that's
been in prison for killing!"

"There's the king's army," said Michael. "They make good officers in
it."

A strange, half-sore smile came to Dyck's thin lips.

"Michael," said he, "give up these vain illusions. I was condemned for
killing a man not in fair fight.

"I can't enter the army as an officer, and you should know it. The king
himself could set me up again; but the distance between him and me is ten
times round the world and back again!" But then Dyck nodded kindly. It
was as if suddenly the martyr spirit had lifted him out of rigid, painful
isolation, and he was speaking from a hilltop. "No, my friends, what is