As for the other gentlemen, they were fighting as best they could, and all the time striving vainly to gather the mob into a firm body of resistance. None of them saw the plight I was in, nor indeed could have helped me had they done so, since there were but seven gentlemen of us in all, and some by this time wounded, and one dead.
I knelt there upon the ground before the door, slashing out as best I could with one hand, and they closed faster and thicker upon me, and at last I could no more. I felt a stinging pain in my right shoulder, and then for a minute my senses left me. But it was only for a moment.
When I came to myself I was lying bound with a soldier standing guard over me, though there was small need of it, and they were raining battering blows upon the door of Laurel Creek. Somehow they had conceived the idea that there was something of great import therein, by my mad and desperate defence. I know not what they thought, but gradually all the militia were centred at that point striving to force the door. As for the shutters, they were heavily barred, and offered no easier entrance. Indeed the whole house had been strengthened for defence against the Indians before the Bacon uprising, and was near as strong as a fort. It would have been well had we all entered and defended it, though we could not have held out for long, through not being provisioned.
At last Captain Jaynes and the other gentlemen begun to conceive the situation and I caught sight of them forcing their way toward me, and shouted to them with a failing voice, for I had lost much blood, to come nearer and assist me to hold the door. Then I saw Captain Jaynes sink in his saddle, and I caught a glimpse of a mighty retreat of plunging haunches of Parson Downs' horse, and indeed the gist of the blame for it all was afterward put upon the parson's great fiery horse, which it was claimed had run away with him first into the fight, then away from it, such foolish reasons do men love to give for the lapses of the clergy.
As for me, I believe in coming out with the truth about the clergy and laymen, and King and peasant, alike, whether it be Cain or King David, or Parson Downs or his Majesty King Charles the Second.
However, to do the parson justice, he did not fly until he saw the day was lost, and I trow did afterward better service to me than he might have done by staying. As for the burgesses, I know not whither nor when they had gone, for they had melted away like shadows, by reason of the great obloquy which would have attached to them, should men in their high office have been discovered in such work. Ralph Drake was left, who made a push toward me with a hoarse shout, and then he fell, though not severely wounded, and then the soldiers pressed closer. And then I felt again the door yield at my back, and before I knew it I was dragged inside, and, in spite of the pressure of the mob, the door was pushed to with incredible swiftness by Humphrey Hyde's great strength, and the bolt shot.
There I lay on the floor of the hall well-nigh spent, and Mary Cavendish was chafing my hands, bandaging my wounds with some linen got, I knew not whence, and Catherine was there, and all the time the great battering blows upon the door were kept up, and also on the window-shutters, and the door began to shake.
Then I remembered something. There was behind the house a creek which was dry in midsummer, but often, as now, in springtime, swollen with rains, and of sufficient depth and force to float a boat. And when it was possible it had been the custom to send stores of tobacco for lading on shipboard to England, by this short cut of the creek which discharged itself into the river below, and there was for that purpose a great boat in the cellar, and also a door and a little landing.
I, remembering this, whispered to Mary Cavendish with all the strength which I could muster.
"For God's sake," I cried, "go you to the cellar, the boat, the boat, the creek."