“Nay, the two last are as safe as we,” said I.  “Mistress Catherine holds her sister dearer than herself, and as for the captain of the governor’s ship, lock a man’s tongue with the key of his own interest if you wish it not to wag.  But these goods must be moved from here.”

“That is what I well know, Harry,” he said, eagerly.  “All night did I toss and study the matter.  But where?”

“Not in any place on Madam Cavendish’s plantation,” I said, and did not say, as I might have, for ’twas the truth, that I had also tossed and studied, but as yet to no result.

“No, nor on mine, though I swear to thee, were I the only one to consider, I would have them there in a twinkling, but I cannot put my mother and sister in jeopardy even for—­”

“Barry Upper Branch?”

“Nick and Dick swear they will not run the risk; that they have but too lately escaped with their lives, and are too close watched, and as for the parson, ’tis out of the question, and Ralph Drake hath no hiding-place, and as for the others, they one and all refuse, and say this is the safest place in the colony, it being a household of women, and Madam Cavendish well known for her loyalty.”

He looked at me and I at him, and again the old consideration, as I saw his handsome, gallant young face that perchance Mary Cavendish might love him and do worse than to wed him, came over me.

“I will find a place for the goods,” said I.

“You, Harry?”

“Yes, I,” I said.

“But where, Harry?”

“Wait till the need for them come, lad.”  Then I added, for often in my perplexity the wish that the whole lot were at the bottom of the river had seized me, “There is need of them, I suppose?”

But Sir Humphrey said yes, with a great emphasis to that.

“There is sure to be fighting,” he said, “and never were powder and shot so scarce.  ’Tis well the Indians are quiet.  This poor Colony of Virginia hath not enough powder to guard her borders, nor, were it not for her rich soil, enough of food to feed her children since the Navigation Act.

“Oh, God, Harry, if but Nathaniel Bacon had lived!”

“Amen,” I said, and felt as I said it, that if indeed that hero were alive, this plot for the destroying of the young tobacco plants might be the earthquake which threw off a new empire; but as it were, remembering the men concerned, who had none of the stuff of Bacon in them, I wondered if it would prove aught more than a wedge in the scheme of liberty.

“There are those who would be ready to say that we gentlemen of Virginia, like Bacon, are all ready to shelter ourselves behind women’s aprons,” said Sir Humphrey Hyde, with a shamed glance at the goods, referring to that stationing of the ladies of the Berkeley faction, all arrayed in white aprons, on the earthworks before the advance of the sons and husbands and brothers in the Bacon uprising.