But Sir Humphrey stared at me.
"Sure," he said, "it can do no more than to force the king to see that his colony hath grown from infancy to manhood, and hath an arm to be respected, and compel him to repeal the Navigation Act. What else, Harry?"
Then I, speaking again as if some other moved my tongue, replied that none could say what matter a little fire kindleth, but those that came after us might know the result of that which we that night begun.
But Sir Humphrey shook his head.
"If but Nat Bacon were alive!" he sighed. "No leader have we, Harry. Oh, Harry, if thou wert not a convict! Captain Jaynes is sure out of his element in defending the rights of the oppressed, and should be on his own quarter-deck with his cutlass in hand and his rapscallions around him, slaying and robbing, to be in full feather. Naught can he do here. Lord, hear those women shriek! Why did they let women come hither, Harry? Sure Nick Barry is in his cups. Not thus would matters have been were Bacon alive. The women would have been at home in their beds, and no man in liquor at work, for I trust not the militia. Would Captain Bacon were alive, as he would have been, had he not been foully done to death."
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.