ulpeper!" shouted
that same thick voice of the man who was leading the wild crew like
a bell-wether. He forged ahead, something more steady on his legs,
but all the madder of his wits for that, with an arm around the
waist of a buxom lass on either side, and all three dancing in time.
Then all the rest echoed that shout of "Down with the governor!"
Then out he burst again with, "Down, down with the tobacco, down
with the tobacco!" But the volley of that echo was cut short by five
horsemen galloping after the throng and scattering them to the right
and left. Then a great voice of authority, set out with the
strangest oaths which ever an imagination of evil compassed, called
out to them to be still if they valued their heads, and cursed them
all for drunken fools, and as he spoke he lashed with his whip from
side to side, and his face gleamed with wrath like a demon's in the
full light, and I saw he was Captain Noel Jaynes, and well
understood how he had made a name for himself on the high seas.
After him rode the brothers, Nicholas and Richard Barry, two great
men, sticking to their saddles like rocks, with fair locks alike on
the head of each flung out on the wind, and then came Ralph Drake
rising in his stirrups and laughing wildly, and last Parson Downs,
but only last because the road was blocked, for verily I thought his
plunging horse would have all before him under his feet. They were
all past me in a trice like a dream, the May revellers scattering
and hastening forward with shrieks of terror and shouts of rage and
peals of defiant laughter, and Captain Jaynes' voice, like a
trumpet, overbearing everything, and shouts from the Barry brothers
echoing him, and now and then coming the deep rumble of
expostulations from the parson's great chest, and Ralph Drake's
peals of horse-laughter, and I was left to consider what a
tinder-box this Colony of Virginia was, and how ready to leap to
flame at a spark even when seemingly most at peace, and to regard
with more and more anxiety Mary Cavendish's part in this brewing
tumult.

After the shouting and hallooing throng had passed I walked along
slowly, reflecting, as I have said, when I saw in the road before me
two advancing--a woman, and a man leading a horse by the bridle,
and it was Mary Cavendish and Sir Humphrey Hyde.

And when I came up with them they stopped, and Humphrey addressed me
rudely enough, but as one gentleman might another when he was
angered with him,