The Heart

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.