Gerald had come to America from Ireland when he was twenty-one. He had come hastily, as many a better and worse Irishman before and since, with the clothes he had on his back, two shillings above his passage money and a price on his head that he felt was larger than his misdeed warranted.There was no Orangeman this side of hell worth a hundred pounds to the British government or to the devil himself;but if the government felt so strongly about the death of an English absentee landlord's rent agent, it was time for GeraldO'Hara to be leaving and leaving suddenly.True, he had called the rent agent“a bastard of an Orangeman,”but that, according to Gerald's way of looking at it, did not give the man any right to insult him by whistling the opening bars of“The Boyne Water.”
The Battle of the Boyne had been fought more than a hundred years before, but, to the O'Haras and their neighbors, it might have been yesterday when their hopes and their dreams, as well as their lands and wealth, went off in the same cloud of dust that enveloped a frightened and fleeing Stuart prince, leaving William of Orange and his hated troops with their orange cockades to cut down the Irish adherents of the Stuarts.
For this and other reasons, Gerald's family was not inclined to view the fatal outcome of his quarrel as anything very serious, except for the fact that it was charged with serious consequences. For years, the O'Haras had been in bad odor with the English constabulary on account of suspected activities against the government, and Gerald was not the first O'Hara to take his foot in his hand and quit Ireland between dawn and morning.His two oldest brothers, James and Andrew, he hardly remembered, save as close-lipped youths who came and went at odd hours of the night on mysterious errands or disappeared for weeks at a time, to their mother's gnawing anxiety.They had come to America years before, after the discovery of a small arsenal of rifles buried under the O'Hara pigsty.Now they were successful merchants in Savannah,“though the dear God alone knows where that may be,”as their mother always interpolated when mentioning the two oldest of her male brood, and it was to them that young Gerald was sent.
He left home with his mother's hasty kiss on his cheek and her fervent Catholic blessing in his ears, and his father's parting admonition,“Remember who ye are and don't be taking nothing off no man.”His five tall brothers gave him good-by with admiring but slightly patronizing smiles, for Gerald was the baby and the little one of a brawny family.
His five brothers and their father stood six feet and over and broad in proportion, but little Gerald, at twenty-one, knew that five feet four and a half inches was as much as the Lord in His wisdom was going to allow him. It was like Gerald that he never wasted regrets on his lack of height and never found itan obstacle to his acquisition of anything he wanted.Rather, it was Gerald's compact smallness that made him what he was, for he had learned early that little people must be hardy to survive among large ones.And Gerald was hardy.
His tall brothers were a grim, quiet lot, in whom the family tradition of past glories, lost forever, rankled in unspoken hate and crackled out in bitter humor. Had Gerald been brawny, he would have gone the way of the other O'Haras and moved quietly and darkly among the rebels against the government.But Gerald was“loud-mouthed and bullheaded,”as his mother fondly phrased it, hair trigger of temper, quick with his fists and possessed of a chip on his shoulder so large as to be almost visible to the naked eye.He swaggered among the tall O'Haras like a strutting bantam in a barnyard of giant Cochin roosters, and they loved him, baited him affectionately to hear him roar and hammered on him with their large fists no more than was necessary to keep a baby brother in his proper place.
If the educational equipment which Gerald brought to America was scant, he did not even know it. Nor would he have cared if he had been told.His mother had taught him to read and to write a clear hand.He was adept at ciphering.And there his book knowledge stopped.The only Latin he knew was the responses of the Mass and the only history the manifold wrongs of Ireland.He knew no poetry save that of Moore and no music except the songs of Ireland that had come down through the years.While he entertained the liveliest respect for those who had more book learning than he, he never felt his own lack.And what need had he of these things in a new country where the most ignorant of bogtrotters had made great fortunes?in this country which asked only that a man be strong and unafraid of work?
Nor did James and Andrew, who took him into their store in Savannah, regret his lack of education. His clear hand, his accurate figures and his shrewd ability in bargaining won their respect, where a knowledge of literature and a fine appreciation of music, had young Gerald possessed them, would have moved them to snorts of contempt.America, in the early years of the century, had been kind to the Irish.James and Andrew, who had begun by hauling goods in covered wagons from Savannah to Georgia's inland towns, had prospered into a store of their own, and Gerald prospered with them.
He liked the South, and he soon became, in his own opinion, a Southerner. There was much about the South—and Southerners—that he would never comprehend;but, with the whole-heartedness that was his nature, he adopted its ideas and customs, as he understood them, for his own—poker and horse racing, red-hot politics and the code duello, States'Rights and damnation to all Yankees, slavery and King Cotton, contempt for white trash and exaggerated courtesy to women.He even learned to chew tobacco.There was no need for him to acquire a good head for whisky, he had been born with one.