The men were now thoroughly inflamed with the hot new rum, and more than one of them began to cry aloud: ‘It time to get to de reg’lar business.’ But a few still lingered lovingly around the dripping hogshead, catching double handfuls of the fresh spirit in their capacious palms. Presently, one of the women, mad with drink, drew out a short pipe from her filthy pocket and began to fill it to the top with raw tobacco. As she did so, she turned tipsily to a man by her side and asked him for a light. The fellow took a match in his unsteady fingers and struck it on a wooden post, flinging it away when done with among a few small scraps of dry trash that lay by accident upon the ground close by. Trash is the desiccated refuse of cane from which the juice has been already extracted, and it is ordinarily used as a convenient fuel to feed the crushing-mills and boil the molasses. Dry as tinder, it lighted up with a flare instantaneously, and raised a crackling blaze, whose ruddy glow pleased and delighted the childish minds of the half-drunken negroes. ‘How him burn!’ the woman with the pipe cried excitedly. ‘Sposin’ we set fire to de trash-house! My heart, how him blaze den! Him light up all de mountains! Burn de trash-house! Burn de trash-house! Dat pretty for true! Burn de trash-house!’
Quick as lightning, the tipsiest rioters had idly kicked the burning ends of loose trash among the great stacked heaps of dry cane under the big sheds; and in one second, before Delgado could even strive in vain to exert his feeble authority, the whole mass had flashed into a single huge sheet of flame, rising fiercely into the evening sky, and reddening with its glow the peaks around, like the lurid glare of a huge volcano. As the flames darted higher and ever higher, licking up the leaves and stalks as they went, the negroes, now fairly loosed from all restraint, leaped and shrieked wildly around them—some of them half-drunk, others absolutely reeling, and all laughing loud with hideous, wild, unearthly laughter, in their murderous merriment. Delgado alone saw with horror that his great scheme of liberation was being fast rendered ultimately hopeless, and could only now concentrate his attention upon his minor plan of personal vengeance against the Dupuy family. Port-of-Spain would be fairly roused by the blaze in half an hour, but at least there was time to murder outright the one offending Orange Grove household.
For a few minutes, helpless and resourceless, he allowed the half-tipsy excited creatures to dance madly around the flaring fire, and to leap and gesticulate with African ferocity in the red glare of the rapidly burning trash-house. ‘Let dem wear out de rum,’ he cried bitterly to Pourtalès. ‘But in a minute, de Dupuys gwine to be down upon us wit de constables an’ de soldiers, if dem doan’t make haste to kill dem beforehand.’
Soon the drunken rioters themselves began to remember that burning trash-houses and stealing rum were not the only form of amusement they had proposed to themselves for that evening’s entertainment. ‘Kill de buckra!—kill de buckra!’ more than one of them now yelled out fiercely at the top of his voice, brandishing his cutlass. ‘Buckra country for us! Colour for colour! Kill dem all! Kill de buckra!’
Delgado seized at once upon the slender opportunity. ‘Me fren’s,’ he shrieked aloud, raising his palms once more imploringly to heaven, ‘kill dem, kill dem! Follow me! Hallelujah! I gwine to lead you to kill de buckra!’
Most of the negroes, recalled to duty by the old African’s angry voice, now fell once more into their rude marching order; but one or two of them, and those the tipsiest, began to turn back wistfully in the direction of the little pool of new rum that lay sparkling in the glare like molten gold in front of the still running hogshead. Louis Delgado looked at them with the fierce contempt of a strong mind for such incomprehensible vacillating weakness. Wrenching his pistol once more from the tipsy grasp of the man who had first seized it, he pointed it in a threatening attitude at the head of the foremost negro among the recalcitrant drunkards. ‘Dis time I tellin’ you true,’ he cried fiercely, in a tone of unmistakable wrath and firmness. ‘De first man dat take a single step nearer dat liquor, I blow his brains out!’
Reckless with drink, and unable to believe in his leader’s firmness, the foremost man took a step or two, laughing a drunken laugh meanwhile, in the forbidden direction, and then turned round again, grinning like a baboon, toward Louis Delgado.
He had better have trifled with an angry tiger. The fierce old African did not hesitate or falter for a single second; pulling the trigger, he fired straight at the grinning face of the drunken renegade, killing him instantaneously. He fell like a log in the pool of new rum, and reddened the stream even as they looked with the quick crimson flow.
Delgado himself hardly paused a second to glance contemptuously at the fallen recalcitrant. ‘Now, me fren’s,’ he cried firmly, kicking the corpse in his wrath, and with his eye twitching in a terrible fashion, ‘whoebber else disobeys orders, I gwine to shoot him dead dat very minute, same as I shoot dat good-for-nuffin disobedient naygur dar! We has got to kill de buckra to-night, an’ ebbery man ob you must follow me now to kill dem ’mediately. De Lard delibber dem into our hand! Follow me, an’ colour for colour!’
At the word, the last recalcitrants, awed into sobriety for the moment by the sudden and ghastly death of their companion, turned trembling to their place in the rude ranks, and began once more to march on in serried order after Louis Delgado. And with one voice, the tumultuous rabble, putting itself again in rapid motion towards Orange Grove, shrieked aloud once more the terrible watchwords: ‘Colour for colour! Kill de buckra!’