Some one would look from the window. The noise that had been as the other noises of a morning's work swelled in the sea breeze, and there was a commotion, naked figures rushing here and there and--What was that? That white man running with his face all bloody. Could it be the new bookkeeper? Even at this day there are people who will tell you what tradition has told them that the negroes would come on in a body, fling themselves like an avalanche on the Great House and cut down ruthlessly all before them. Or if they found the white people fled, they satisfied their desires by broaching the rum casks and breaking open the stores. This possibly saved many lives, for while the enemy were thus engaged the fugitives made the best of their way to some place of safety. They did not always succeed in reaching it, for the slaves knew the woods far better than their masters, a thousand times better than their mistresses, and they hunted them, beat the bush for them, as beaters beat for pheasants, cut down the men with the machetes they themselves had supplied or beat them with conch shells--and the women, nothing could be more terrible than the fate of the poor girl cowering on the hillside among the dense jungle, its very denseness betraying her presence to eyes keen as those of these savages trained to hunt. Edwards gives no details of what happened to the women slain in this rebellion, but a little later on he speaks of the rebellion in Hayti and he tells how a superintendent who had been popular and good to his slaves was treated by them when they rose, and he adds the ghastly details of what happened to his wife, who was expecting almost immediately the birth of her baby. They are too terrible to give here, though I do not count myself over-squeamish, but it made me understand why Zachary Bayley fled at full speed along those rough hillside tracks to warn the planters. There is another horrible story told of a Jamaican planter whose slaves rose against him, slaves whom he trusted and to whom he had been kind. They rose in the night led by a runaway he had rescued from starving in the woods. They gagged him and then proceeded to torture him, “by turns wounded his most tender and sensitive parts till his soul took flight.” They violated his wife and killed her with the rest of the family and every white man on the plantation. This is what the white people feared subconsciously all the time. What the girls feared when they let down their hair and undressed for the night, when they drew together the shutters and shut out the gorgeous tropical moonlight, what the master of the house feared when he stirred in his sleep, uneasily, roused because the dogs were barking, what the mother feared as she hushed her baby's crying to listen, and wonder if that were the tramp of unshod feet over in the direction of the breeze mill. It is what Zachary Bayley feared when he tore across the country in the dawn of the tropical morning.