ways."

"The criminal part of the business was mentioned later on, I suppose?"

"I don't know that there's anything criminal about it," said Sam. "I'm
jolly well sure it wasn't wrong, under the circumstances. But it may
have been criminal. That's just what I want you to tell me.

"I'll give you my opinion," I said, "when I hear what it was."

"Gun-running," said Sam.

Gun-running has for some time been a popular sport in Ireland, and I
find it very difficult to say whether it is against the law or not. The
Government goes in for trying to stop it, which looks as if a gun-runner
might be prosecuted when caught. On the other hand, the Government never
prosecutes gun-runners, even those who openly boast of their exploits,
and that looks as if it were quite a legal amusement. I promised Sam
that I would consider the point, and I asked him to tell me exactly what
he did.

"Well," he said, "when I heard it was gunrunning I simply jumped at the
chance. Any fellow would. I said I'd start right away, if he liked As a
matter of fact, we didn't start for nearly a fortnight The boat turned
out to be the _Pegeen_. You know the _Pegeen_, don't you?"

I did not I am not a sailor, and except that I cannot help seeing
paragraphs about _Shamrock IV_. in the daily papers I do not think I
know the name of a single yacht.

"Well," said Sam, "she's O'Meara's boat I've sailed in her sometimes in
cruiser races. She's slow and never does any good, but she's a fine sea
boat. My idea was that Hazlewood had hired her, and I didn't find out
till after we had started that O'Meara was on board. That surprised me
a bit, for O'Meara goes in for being rather an extreme kind of
Nationalist--not the sort of fellow you'd expect to be running guns for
Carson and the Ulster Volunteers. However, I was jolly glad to see him.
He crawled out of the cabin when we were a couple of miles out of the
harbour, and by that time I'd have been glad to see anyone who knew one
end of the boat from the other. Old Hazlewood was all right; but the
other three men were simply rotters, the sort of fellows who'd be just
as likely as not to take a pull on a topsail halyard when told to slack
away the lee runner. I was just making up my mind to work the boat
single-handed when O'Meara turned up. There was a middling fresh breeze
from the west, and we were going south on a reach. I didn't get much
chance of a talk with O'Meara because he was in one watch and I in the
othe