When the horses were something quieted, I, desiring not to unfold my
errand in the tavern, got hold of Parson Downs by his mighty arm,
and elbowed Dick Barry, who cursed at me for it, and cut short
Captain Jaynes's last string of oaths, and hallooed to Nick Barry,
and asked if I could have a word with them. Captain Jaynes, though,
as I have said, being in the main curiously well disposed toward me,
swore at first that he would be damned if he would stop better
business to parley with a damned convict tutor; but the end of it
was that he and the Barry brothers and Parson Downs and I stood
together under that mighty humming locust tree, and I unfolded my
scheme of moving the powder and shot from Locust Creek to Major
Robert Beverly's tomb. Noel Jaynes stared at me a second, with his
hard red face agape, and then he clapped me upon the shoulder, and
shouted with laughter, and swore that it should be done, and that it
was a burning hell shame that the goods had been put where they were
to the risk of a maid of beauty like Mary Cavendish, and that he and
the Barrys would be with me that very night before moonrise to move
them.
Then the parson, who had a poetical turn, especially when in his
cups, added, quite gravely, that no safer place could there be for
powder than the tomb of love whose last sparks had died out in
ashes; and Dick Barry cried with an oath that it would serve Robert
Beverly rightly for his action against them in the Bacon rising, for
though he was to the front with the oppressed people in this, his
past foul treachery against them was not forgot, and well he
remembered that when he was in hiding for his life-But then his brother hushed him and said, with a shout of dry
laughter, that the past was past, and no use in dwelling upon it,
but that when it came to a safe hiding-place for goods which were to
set the kingdom in a blaze, and maybe hang the ringleaders, he knew
of none better than the tomb of a first wife, which, when the second
was in full power, was verily back of the farthest back door of a
man's memory.
So it was arranged that the four were to meet me that very night
after sunset and before moonrise, and move the goods, and I mounted
and rode away, with Parson Downs shouting after me his proposition
to trade horses, and even offering ten pounds to boot when he saw
the splendid long pace of my thoroughbred flinging out his legs with
that freest motion of anything in the world, unless it be the swift
upward cleave of a bird when the fluttering of wing wherewith he
hath gained his impetus hath ceased, and nothing except that
invincible rising is seen.