The dreadful signals had ceased at last, and all lay down to rest; but I remained awake and saw through the great seaward windows the wonderful dawn of the tropics flush over sky and ocean.  But presently its heavenly silence was broken by the gallop of a single horse, and a Danish orderly, heavily armed, passed the street-side windows, off at last for Christiansted.

Soon the conchs and horns began again.  With them was blent now the tramp of many feet and the harsh voices of swarming insurgents.  Their long silence was explained; they had been sharpening their weapons.

Their first act of violence was to break open a sugar storehouse.  They mixed a barrel of sugar with one of rum, killed a hog, poured in his blood, added gunpowder, and drank the compound—­to make them brave.  Then with barrels of rum and sugar they changed a whole cistern of water into punch, stirring it with their sharpened hoes, dipping it out with huge sugar-boiler ladles, and drinking themselves half blind.

Jack dashed in from the gate:  “Oh, Miss Marcia, go look! dem a-comin’!  Gin’ral Buddoe at dem head on he w’ite hoss.”

We ran to the jalousies.  In the street, coming southward toward the fort, were full two thousand blacks.  They walked and ran, the women with their skirts tied up in fighting trim, and all armed with hatchets, hoes, cutlasses, and sugar-cane bills.  The bills were fitted on stout pole handles, and all their weapons had been ground and polished until they glittered horridly in their black hands and above the gaudy Madras turbans or bare woolly heads and bloodshot eyes.

“Dem goin’ to de fote to ax foo freedom,” Jack cried.

At their head rode “Gin’ral Buddoe,” large, powerful, black, in a cocked hat with a long white plume.  A rusty sword rattled at his horse’s flank.  As he came opposite my window I saw a white man, alone, step out from the house across the way and silently lift his arms to the multitude to halt.

They halted.  It was the Roman Catholic priest.  For a moment they gave attention, then howled, brandished their weapons, and pressed on.  Aunt Marcia dropped to her knees and in tears began to pray aloud; but we cried to her that Rachel, a slave woman, was coming, who must not see our alarm.  Indeed, both Rachel and Tom had already entered.

“La!  Miss Mary Ann, wha’ fur you cryin’?  Who’s goin’ tech you?” Rachel held by its four corners a Madras kerchief full of sugar.  “Da what we done come fur, to tell Miss Paula” [grandmamma] “not be frightened.”

Tom was off again while grandmamma said:  “Rachel, you’ve been stealing.”

“Well, Miss Paula! ain’t I gwine hab my sheah w’en dem knock de head’ out dem hogsitt’ an’ tramp de sugah under dah feet an’ mix a whole cisron o’ punch?”

Rachel told the events of the night.  But as she talked a roar without rose higher and higher, and I, running with Jack to the gate, beheld two smaller mobs coming round a near corner.  The foremost was dragging along the ground by ropes a huge object, howling, striking, and hacking at it.  The other was doing the same to something smaller tied to a stick of wood, and the air was full of their cries: