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"Didn't I tell you?" he said, "didn't I tell everyone when the election was on, that the Sinn Feiners was the lads to do the trick for us? Didn't I say that without we'd get a republic in Ireland the country would do no good? And there's the proof of it." He slapped the paper heartily with his hand. To Lady Corless, whose mind was working rapidly, his reasoning seemed a little inconclusive.
All Tuesday the Sinn Feiners had been preparing for the inevitable battle, but these preparations merely took the shape of consolidating the positions already occupied. At O'Connell Bridge, for example, Kelly's shop at the corner of Bachelors' Walk was garrisoned, and Hopkins's jewellery establishment at the opposite corner was similarly occupied.
"I say," he said, "wot are these Sinn Feiners? I mean to say 'oo are they? Are they Irish, too?" Henry tried to explain who the Sinn Feiners were. "But wot they want to do? Wot's the point of all this ... this 'umbuggin' about?
On the same day one hundred and fifty Sinn Feiners were arrested, including Mr. De Valera and Mr. Arthur Griffith, and on the 25th a statement was published indicating the connection between this conspiracy and Casement's designs in 1916.
But there was a strained feeling at headquarters as if the decision had been made after a hard fight. Alderman Thomas Kelly, one of the oldest of the Sinn Feiners, told me that he had backed DeValera in his refusal to countenance a needless loss of life, and that it was only after a good struggle that their point had won.
It was under cover of the blazing buildings that the troops advanced upon the central position of the Sinn Feiners, one of the pickets being inside Clery's while the embers beneath his feet were still red, as I was told: but it was not until Saturday morning that the actual final shelling and capture of the place was begun.
This physical force element, therefore, the Sinn Feiners and Larkinites had in common with the Redmondites and Ulstermen: the fact that they actually were the first to put the principle into operation is no difference at all.
It was now about four o'clock, and still I looked out into the street below the people were beginning to go wild with excitement, for every now and then the Sinn Feiners would fire blank cartridges, and each time they did so, with the one cry "The soldiers are coming!" a mass of several thousand men, women, and children would rush now to one end of Sackville Street, now to the other.
The Sinn Feiners saw him, and the red-haired man ordered his subordinates to arrest him. They ran across the street and attempted to seize him, but he resisted, and raised his walking stick to defend himself. A rebel caught hold of the stick, and the two men stood there, against a gateway, struggling to wrest the stick from each other.
There was a Sinn Feiner on guard at the gate near Henry's Club, and sitting at the open window, Henry could see him very distinctly: a little, red-haired, angry man, who chewed his moustache and gaped about him with bloodshot eyes. There were other Sinn Feiners with him, but he was the most distinctive.
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