It was no slight task for even a hundred to cut such a wealth of tobacco as Major Robert Beverly had planted, work as fast as they might, and proceed over the fields in a fierce crawl of destruction, like an army of locusts, and finally they begun to wax impatient. And finally up rose that termagant, Mistress Longman, straightening her back with a spring as if it were whalebone, showing us her face shameless with rage, and stained green with tobacco juice, and here and there red with blood, for she had slashed ruthlessly. She flung back her coarse tangle of hair, threw up her arms with a wild hurrahing motion, and screamed out in such a volume of shrillness that she overcapped all the rest of the tumult: "To the stables, to the stables! Let out Major Beverly's horses, and let them trample down the tobacco." Then such a cry echoed her that I trow it might have proceeded from a thousand throats instead of one hundred odd, and in spite of all that Captain Jaynes could do, seconded by some few of us gentlemen who rallied about him, but were helpless since we could not fire upon our coadjutors, that mob swept into Beverly's stables, and presently out leapt, plunging with terror, all his fine thoroughbreds, the mob riding them about the fields in wild career. And one of the maddest of the riders, sitting astride and flogging her steed with a locust branch, was Mistress Longman, while her husband vainly fled after her, beseeching her to stop, and those around were roaring with laughter. Then some must let out the major's hogs, and they came rooting and tumbling with unwieldy gambols. And with this wild troop of animals, and the mob shrieking in a frenzy of delight, and now and then a woman in terror before the onslaught of a galloping horse, and now and then a whole group of cutters overset by a charging hog, and up and after him, and slaying him, and his squeals of agony, verily I had preferred a battlefield of a different sort. And all this time Major Robert Beverly's house stood still in the moonlight, and not a noise from the slave quarters, and the fields were all in a pumice of wasted plant life, and we were about to go farther when I heard again the cry of the little child coming from a chamber window. I trow they had given her some quieting potion or she had broken silence before. With all our efforts the mob could not be persuaded to return Major Beverly's horses to his stables, which circumstance was afterward to the saving of his neck, since it was argued that he would not have abetted the using of his fine stud in such wise, some of the horses being recovered and some being lamed and cut. So out of the Beverly plantation we swept; those on horseback at a gallop and those on foot tramping after, and above the tumult came that farthest-reaching cry of the world--the cry of a little child frantic with terror.