The sympathy of many of them was with the colonists who made a stand
against tyranny, and they were half-hearted, if whole-handed, for
the King.
Just before they bore me across the threshold of Laurel Creek, those
troopers who had been sent to search the house, clattered down the
stair and swore that not so much as a mouse was in hiding there,
then we all went forth.
Captain Waller, though walking somewhat weakly himself, kept close
to my side. And he did not mount horse until we were out in the
highway.
The grounds of Laurel Creek and the tobacco fields were a most
lamentable sight, though I seemed to see everything as through a
mist. Here and there one lay sprawled with limbs curled like a dead
spider, or else flung out at a stiff length of agony. And Capt. Noel
Jaynes lay dead with a better look on his gaunt old face in death
than in life. In truth Capt. Noel Jaynes might almost have been
taken for a good man as he lay there dead. And the outlaw who lived
next door to Margery Key was doubled up where he fell in a sulky
heap of death, and by his side wept his shrewish wife, shrilly
lamenting as if she were scolding rather than grieving, and I trow
in the midst of it all, the thought passed through my mind that it
was well for that man that he was past hearing, for it seemed as if
she took him to task for having died.
Of Dick Barry was no sign to be seen, but Nick lay not dead, but
dead drunk, and over him was crouched one of those black women with
a knife in her hand, and no one molested her, thinking him dead, but
dead he was not, only drunk, and she was wounded herself, with the
blood trickling from her head, unable to carry him from the field as
she had brought him.
They carried me past them, and the black woman's eyes rolled up at
us like a wild beast's in a jungle defending her mate, and I
remember thinking, though dimly, as a man will do when he has lost
much blood, that love was love, and perhaps showed forth the
brighter and whiter, the viler and blacker the heart which held it,
and then I knew no more for a space.