"Men!" said Amyas in a low voice, "I trust you all not to shoot till I do. Then give them one arrow, out swords, and at them! Pass the word along."
Up they came, slowly, and all hearts beat loud at their coming.
First, about twenty soldiers, only one-half of whom were on foot; the other half being borne, incredible as it may seem, each in a chair on the back of a single Indian, while those who marched had consigned their heavier armor and their arquebuses into the hands of attendant slaves, who were each pricked on at will by the pikes of the soldier behind them.
"The men are made to let their ordnance out of their hands."
"Oh, sir, an Indian will pray to an arquebus not to shoot him; be sure their artillery is safe enough," said Yeo.
"Look at the proud villains," whispered another, "to make dumb beasts of human creatures like that!"
"Ten shot," counted the businesslike Amyas, "and ten pikes."
Last of this troop came some inferior officer, also in his chair, who, as he went slowly up the hill, with his face turned toward the gang which followed, drew every other second the cigar from his lips, to inspirit them with those ejaculations which earned for the Spaniards of the sixteenth century the uncharitable imputation of being the most abominable swearers of all Europeans.
"The blasphemous dog!" said Yeo, fumbling at his bowstring, as if he longed to send an arrow through him. But Amyas had hardly laid his finger on the impatient veteran's arm, when another procession followed, which made them forget all else.
A line of Indians, Negroes, and Zambos, naked, emaciated, scarred with whips and fetters, and chained together by their left wrists, toiled upwards, panting and perspiring under the burden of a basket held up by a strap which passed across their foreheads. Yeo's sneer was but too just; there were not only old men and youths among them, but women; slender young girls, mothers with children running at their knee; and, at the sight, a low murmur of indignation rose from the ambushed Englishmen, worthy of the free and righteous hearts of those days, when Raleigh could appeal to man and God, on the ground of a common humanity, in behalf of the outraged heathens of the New World; when Englishmen still knew that man was man, and that the instinct of freedom was the righteous voice of God; ere the hapless seventeenth century had brutalized them also, by bestowing on them, amid a hundred other bad legacies, the fatal gift of negro-slaves.