"Ay," said the other, "and there was the devil to pay, I can tell you, when I had to report you missing to Sir William. But Major Carrington stood my friend, and I got off with a tongue-drubbing. Well, after about three weeks or so, during which time the dogs and the searchers brought back most all of the runaway niggers, and Mistress Lettice had hysterics every day, back comes the Colonel and Sir Charles with ten of the twenty men who had rowed them up the Pamunkey. The rest had fallen in a brush with the Monacans. They hadn't come up with the Ricahecrians, hadn't seen hair nor hide of them, had but one report from the Indian villages along the river, and that was that no Ricahecrians had passed that way. So after a while they were forced to believe that they were upon a false scent, and back they comes post haste to the Plantations to get more men, and go up the Rappahannock. Well, they went up the Rappahannock, and found nothing to their purpose, so back they came again to try the James and the country above the Falls. This time they found the Settlements, which had been before like an overturned hive, pretty quiet, the ringleaders of your precious plot having all been strung up, and the rest made as mild as sheep with branding and whipping and doubling of times. So, the tobacco being in and the plantation quiet, things were left to Haines, and I came along with the Colonel. Major Carrington, too, who they say is in the Governor's black books, though Lord knows he was active enough in stamping out this insurrection, asked to be allowed to join in the search for his old friend's daughter, and so he's down in the woods yonder. And Mr. Cary is there, and Mr. Peyton (Mistress Betty Carrington made _him_ come) and Mr. Jaclyn Carter. Fegs! half the young gentry in the colony pressed their services on the Colonel. It got to be the fashion to volunteer to run their heads into the wolf's mouth for Mistress Patricia. But Sir Charles choked most of them off. 'Gentlemen,' he says, says he, 'despite the saying that there cannot be too much of a good thing, I beg to remind you that the disastrous fortunes of those who first struggled with the forest and the Indians in this western paradise are attributed to the fact that they were two thirds gentlemen. Wherefore let us shun the rock upon which they split'--" "How many of my fellow conspirators were put to death?" interrupted Landless.