The Heart

This he said believing, as did many, that Bacon's death was due to

treachery and not fever, nor, as many of his enemies affirmed, from

over-indulgence in strong spirits, and I must say that I,

remembering Bacon's greatness of enthusiasm and fixedness of

purpose, was of the same belief.

As he spoke I seemed to see that dead hero as he would have looked

in our midst with the moonlight shining on the stern whiteness of

his face, and that look of high command in his eyes which none dared

gainsay. And I answered again and again, as with an impulse not my

own, "And maybe Bacon in truth leads us still, if not by his own

chosen ways, to his own ends."

"Truly, Harry," Sir Humphrey agreed, "had it not been for Bacon, I

doubt if we had been at this night's work."

All the time we talked, we advanced in our slashing swath up the

field, and all the time that chorus of wild laughter and shrieks of

disloyalty kept time with the swash of the knives, and all the time

rose Captain Jaynes' storm of fruitless curses and commands, and now

and then the stinging lash of his riding whip, and also Dick

Barry's. As for Nick Barry, he lay overcome with sleep on a heap of

the cut tobacco.

And all the time not a light shone in any of Major Robert Beverly's

windows, and the slave quarters were as still as the tomb.

The store of ammunition in the tomb had been secretly removed and

portioned out to the plant-cutters at nightfall.

It was no slight task for even a hundred to cut such a wealth of

tobacco as Major Robert Beverly had planted, work as fast as they

might, and proceed over the fields in a fierce crawl of destruction,

like an army of locusts, and finally they begun to wax impatient.

And finally up rose that termagant, Mistress Longman, straightening

her back with a spring as if it were whalebone, showing us her face

shameless with rage, and stained green with tobacco juice, and here

and there red with blood, for she had slashed ruthlessly. She flung

back her coarse tangle of hair, threw up her arms with a wild

hurrahing motion, and screamed out in such a volume of shrillness

that she overcapped all the rest of the tumult: "To the stables, to the stables! Let out Major Beverly's horses, and

let them trample down the tobacco."

Then such a cry echoed her that I trow it might have proceeded from

a thousand throats instead of one hundred odd, and in spite of all

that Captain Jaynes could do, seconded by some few of us gentlemen

who rallied about him, but were helpless since we could not fire

upon our coadjutors, that mob swept into Beverly's stables, and

presently out leapt, plunging with terror, all his fine

thoroughbreds, the mob riding them about the fields in wild career.

And one of the maddest of the riders, sitting astride and flogging

her steed with a locust branch, was Mistress Longman, while her

husband vainly fled after her, beseeching her to stop, and those

around were roaring with laughter.