The Heart

Then some must let out the major's hogs, and they came rooting and

tumbling with unwieldy gambols. And with this wild troop of animals,

and the mob shrieking in a frenzy of delight, and now and then a

woman in terror before the onslaught of a galloping horse, and now

and then a whole group of cutters overset by a charging hog, and up

and after him, and slaying him, and his squeals of agony, verily I

had preferred a battlefield of a different sort. And all this time

Major Robert Beverly's house stood still in the moonlight, and not a

noise from the slave quarters, and the fields were all in a pumice

of wasted plant life, and we were about to go farther when I heard

again the cry of the little child coming from a chamber window. I

trow they had given her some quieting potion or she had broken

silence before.

With all our efforts the mob could not be persuaded to return Major

Beverly's horses to his stables, which circumstance was afterward to

the saving of his neck, since it was argued that he would not have

abetted the using of his fine stud in such wise, some of the horses

being recovered and some being lamed and cut.

So out of the Beverly plantation we swept; those on horseback at a

gallop and those on foot tramping after, and above the tumult came

that farthest-reaching cry of the world--the cry of a little

child frantic with terror.

Then they were for going to another large plantation belonging to

one Richard Forster, who had gone in Ralph Drake's party, when all

of a sudden the horses of us who were leading swerved aside, and

there was Mistress Mary Cavendish on her Merry Roger, and by her

side, pulling vainly at her bridle, her sister Catherine.