This he said believing, as did many, that Bacon’s death was due to treachery and not fever, nor, as many of his enemies affirmed, from over-indulgence in strong spirits, and I must say that I, remembering Bacon’s greatness of enthusiasm and fixedness of purpose, was of the same belief.

As he spoke I seemed to see that dead hero as he would have looked in our midst with the moonlight shining on the stern whiteness of his face, and that look of high command in his eyes which none dared gainsay.  And I answered again and again, as with an impulse not my own, “And maybe Bacon in truth leads us still, if not by his own chosen ways, to his own ends.”

“Truly, Harry,” Sir Humphrey agreed, “had it not been for Bacon, I doubt if we had been at this night’s work.”

All the time we talked, we advanced in our slashing swath up the field, and all the time that chorus of wild laughter and shrieks of disloyalty kept time with the swash of the knives, and all the time rose Captain Jaynes’ storm of fruitless curses and commands, and now and then the stinging lash of his riding whip, and also Dick Barry’s.  As for Nick Barry, he lay overcome with sleep on a heap of the cut tobacco.

And all the time not a light shone in any of Major Robert Beverly’s windows, and the slave quarters were as still as the tomb.

The store of ammunition in the tomb had been secretly removed and portioned out to the plant-cutters at nightfall.

It was no slight task for even a hundred to cut such a wealth of tobacco as Major Robert Beverly had planted, work as fast as they might, and proceed over the fields in a fierce crawl of destruction, like an army of locusts, and finally they begun to wax impatient.  And finally up rose that termagant, Mistress Longman, straightening her back with a spring as if it were whalebone, showing us her face shameless with rage, and stained green with tobacco juice, and here and there red with blood, for she had slashed ruthlessly.  She flung back her coarse tangle of hair, threw up her arms with a wild hurrahing motion, and screamed out in such a volume of shrillness that she overcapped all the rest of the tumult: 

“To the stables, to the stables!  Let out Major Beverly’s horses, and let them trample down the tobacco.”

Then such a cry echoed her that I trow it might have proceeded from a thousand throats instead of one hundred odd, and in spite of all that Captain Jaynes could do, seconded by some few of us gentlemen who rallied about him, but were helpless since we could not fire upon our coadjutors, that mob swept into Beverly’s stables, and presently out leapt, plunging with terror, all his fine thoroughbreds, the mob riding them about the fields in wild career.  And one of the maddest of the riders, sitting astride and flogging her steed with a locust branch, was Mistress Longman, while her husband vainly fled after her, beseeching her to stop, and those around were roaring with laughter.