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!’