So at last Nicolas Herkimer, who had already stood on the table a few minutes and let his keen, earnest eyes pass over the assembly, raised his voice. He spoke long and impressively. He unfolded in every particular the plan which he had, in its chief parts, before told Lambert. In it he had thought of everything, remembered everything, and reduced to its smallest compass the threatened danger that could be avoided. "That is what I have to say," he concluded. "Now it is for you to test my proposals. We are free men, and each one can in the end do what he pleases, and carry his hide to market this way or that. But that we are free does not forbid us to be united. On the other hand, only by being united shall we preserve and protect our freedom. United we cannot be and become, if you talk and cry out among each other as just now you did, again. Whoever knows anything better than I, let him come here and speak. Let him who does not, keep still and listen. And let us not forget--what we tell our children--that he who will not hear must feel. Who wishes to speak after me?" "I!" "I!" called out a couple of dozen voices. "You cannot all speak at once," said Herkimer with some bitterness; "so you come here, Hans Haberkorn. You screamed the loudest." Hans Haberkorn, the ferryman, appeared beside Herkimer on the table. The small, undersized, barefoot fellow who had, behind the bar connected with his ferry, so often spoken large words and scolded his rich neighbor on the other side of the river, could not let the opportunity pass to tell the last speaker the truth--as he expressed it--before all the world. He wanted to know whether it was honest and neighborly in Nicolas Herkimer that he wanted three ferries at the same time over the river within half a mile of each other, after it had been promised him, Hans Haberkorn, that he should be the only ferryman on this ground? That he on that account had settled on a piece of land which consisted of moor and sand, and on which he would long since have starved if he had not also a beer saloon. Now the two ferries should be used only in urgent cases, and then again discontinued, or--what would follow--let the wolf eat. It was absolutely certain that one ferry without a beer saloon could not support itself. Both the other ferries would want to set up beer saloons, and then it would be to him, personally, the same whether the French came to-day or to-morrow and killed him with his wife and children. For his part he would rather be put to death at once than starve to death by degrees. "Hans Haberkorn is right!" called out half a dozen voices.