The Heart

When the horses were something quieted, I, desiring not to unfold my

errand in the tavern, got hold of Parson Downs by his mighty arm,

and elbowed Dick Barry, who cursed at me for it, and cut short

Captain Jaynes's last string of oaths, and hallooed to Nick Barry,

and asked if I could have a word with them. Captain Jaynes, though,

as I have said, being in the main curiously well disposed toward me,

swore at first that he would be damned if he would stop better

business to parley with a damned convict tutor; but the end of it

was that he and the Barry brothers and Parson Downs and I stood

together under that mighty humming locust tree, and I unfolded my

scheme of moving the powder and shot from Locust Creek to Major

Robert Beverly's tomb. Noel Jaynes stared at me a second, with his

hard red face agape, and then he clapped me upon the shoulder, and

shouted with laughter, and swore that it should be done, and that it

was a burning hell shame that the goods had been put where they were

to the risk of a maid of beauty like Mary Cavendish, and that he and

the Barrys would be with me that very night before moonrise to move

them.

Then the parson, who had a poetical turn, especially when in his

cups, added, quite gravely, that no safer place could there be for

powder than the tomb of love whose last sparks had died out in

ashes; and Dick Barry cried with an oath that it would serve Robert

Beverly rightly for his action against them in the Bacon rising, for

though he was to the front with the oppressed people in this, his

past foul treachery against them was not forgot, and well he

remembered that when he was in hiding for his life-But then his brother hushed him and said, with a shout of dry

laughter, that the past was past, and no use in dwelling upon it,

but that when it came to a safe hiding-place for goods which were to

set the kingdom in a blaze, and maybe hang the ringleaders, he knew

of none better than the tomb of a first wife, which, when the second

was in full power, was verily back of the farthest back door of a

man's memory.

So it was arranged that the four were to meet me that very night

after sunset and before moonrise, and move the goods, and I mounted

and rode away, with Parson Downs shouting after me his proposition

to trade horses, and even offering ten pounds to boot when he saw

the splendid long pace of my thoroughbred flinging out his legs with

that freest motion of anything in the world, unless it be the swift

upward cleave of a bird when the fluttering of wing wherewith he

hath gained his impetus hath ceased, and nothing except that

invincible rising is seen.