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.’