The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
He put on his hat, and said to himself: "I will go to the Methodist
meeting-house: they work directly upon the conscience, deepen the sense
of sin, and preach a quick cleansing as by light shining in. There I may
grovel in the sight of men and women and arise redeemed. But, no. It is
the Sabbath my daughter's marriage is to be announced in our own church,
and it would be cowardly, not to say unseemly, to fly from one worship
to another now. If I go to church this morning it must be to our own. Is
there any excuse but cowardice for not going?"
He looked into his debtor nature, to see what he owed to anybody, that
might be owned and settled this day.
Slowly and almost to his dislike there arose an obligation to his
wife--the obligation of love he was defrauding her of, if, indeed, he
loved her at all with the ardor of old times.
She had fretted his passion away in little sticklings for little
proprieties, and narrowing understanding, and subservience to effeminate
social traditions. She jarred upon the health of his intellect with her
unsympathetic refinements and pitiful uncharities, and fear of all
catholicity. She was gentility itself, without the spark of nature, and
believing that she inhabited the castle towers of exclusiveness and
social righteousness, she had made his home the donjon-keep of his
knighthood, at once the loftiest domestic apartment and the prison.
Nevertheless, she was his wife, and something of her nature must be in
Vesta, though the Judge had not found it. He reflected that his
waywardness might have sharpened her peculiarities and spread the
distance between their minds, till, deprived of a husband's guidance,
her fluttered woman's nature had quit the pasturage of the fields and
air, and perched upon her nest and vegetated there.
"I have gone away from her," he said, "and complain that she has not
grown. I have myself abounded in village dignity and pretension, and set
her the example of respecting nothing else. I have been a fraud, and
wonder that she is not wordly-wise."
He found his infirm will very obdurate against making love to his wife
again, but the request he had just made of Heaven, to lead him into the
right steps, prevailed upon him to make his worship at home this
morning.
"Yes," he said, "I will start right. She is sick and alone, and Vesta
taken from her. I will send a note to the rector to announce the
marriage, as Vesta requested, and do my worship at Teackle Hall this
day."
The Manokin, spreading wider as it flowed farther from the town, and
widening from a brook to a creek, till it moistened fringes of marsh and
cut low bluffs into the fields, never seemed to invite him so much to
wander along its sluices as this morn.
"If my wife would only walk with me into the country," he said,
restlessly, "how more companionable we would have been to each other!
But she cannot walk at all; all masculine intercourse ceased between us
years ago, and the dull, small range of household talk, and the dynastic
gossip of the good families, wear down my spirits. But I have been a
truant husband, and my tongue is parched by dusty rovings in prodigal
ways. Let me woo her again with all my might!"
He walked through Princess Anne, worship now having commenced in all the
churches, and saw nobody upon the street except a divided group before
the tavern. There he heard Jimmy Phoebus speak to Levin Dennis
sharply:
"Levin, what you doin' with that nigger buyer? Ain't you got no Dennis
pride left in you?"
The Judge saw that Joe Johnson, safe from civil process on Sunday, even
if his enemy had not been helpless in bed, was washing Levin Dennis's
brandy-sickened head under the street pump, plying the pump-handle and
shampooing him with alternate hands.
"Jimmy," answered Levin, when he was free from the spout, "this
gentleman's give me a job. I'm goin' to take him out for tarrapin on the
Sound. He's goin' to pay me for it."
"Tarrapin-catchin' on a Sunday ain't no respectable job for a Dennis,
nohow," cried Jimmy Phoebus, bluntly; "an' doin' it with a nigger
buyer is a fine splurge fur you, by smoke! I can't see where your pride
is, Levin, to save my life."
Jack Wonnell, wearing a bell-crown, looked on with timid enjoyment of
this plain talk, opening his mouth to grin, shutting it to shudder.
The big stranger, dropping Levin Dennis, strode in his long jack-boots,
in which his coarse trousers were stuffed, right to the front of Jimmy
Phoebus, and glared at him through his inflamed and unsightly eye.
Jimmy met his scowl with a mildness almost amounting to contempt.
"Hark ye!" spoke the stranger, "you have been a picking a quarrel with
me all yisterday, an' to-day air a beginnin' of it agin. Do you want to
fight?"
"No," said Jimmy, whittling a stick; "I ain't fond of fighting, and I
never do it of a Sunday. I wouldn't be guilty of fightin' you, by
smoke!"
"I have tuk a bigger nug than you and nicked his kicks into the bottom
of his gizzard till his liver-lights fell into my mauleys. So it's nish
or knife betwixt us, my bene cove!"
He put his hand upon his hip, where he carried a sheath-knife.
"Raise that hand," said Jimmy Phoebus, with a quick pass of his
whittling knife to the giant's throat. "Raise it or, by smoke! yer goes
yer jugler."
As Phoebus spoke he lifted one foot, of a prodigious size, as deftly
as an elephant hoisting his trunk, and kicked the man's hand from the
hip pocket without moving either his own body or countenance. It was
done so automatically that the other turned fiercely to see who kicked
him, and his sheath-knife, partly raised, was flung by the force of the
kick several yards away.
"Pick up his knife, Levin," Jimmy said, "or he'll hurt hisself with it."
At this moment Judge Custis came up and pushed the two powerful men
apart.
"Fighting on Sunday in our public street," he exclaimed; "Phoebus, I
wouldn't have thought it of you!"
"This yer bully, Judge," Jimmy said coolly, "started to take Prencess
Anne the fust day, an' ole Meshach's Samson knocked him a sprawlin', an'
Meshach hisself finished him. To-day he starts in to lead off yon poor
imbecile, Levin Dennis, and, as I expresses my opinion of it, he draws
his knife on me; so I takes my foot, Judge, that you have seen me untie
a knot with, and I spiles his wrist with it. Take care of his knife,
Levin,--he's a pore creetur without it."
"We'll have this out, nope for nope, or may I take the morning-drop!"
growled the strange man.
"That kind of language ain't understood in honest company," Jimmy
Phoebus said; "I s'pose it's thieves' lingo, used among your friends,
or, maybe, big words you bully strangers with, when you want to cut a
splurge. Now, as you've been licked by a nigger and kicked by a white
man, maybe you can understand my language! Hark you, too, nigger buyer!
Do you know where I saw you first?"
For the first time a flash of fire came from the pungy captain's black
cherries of eyes, and his huge broad face of swarthy color expressed its
full Oriental character:
"The last time I saw you, Joe Johnson, was not a-lurking in Judge
Custis's kitchen fur no good, nor a-insultin' of the Judge's t'other
visitor, Milburn of the steeple-top: it was a-huggin' the whippin'-post
on the public green of Georgetown, State of Delaware, an' the sheriff
a-layin' of it over your back; an' after he sot you up in the pillory I
took the rottenest egg I could git, an' I bust it right on the eye where
that nigger bruised you yisterday!"
The oppressive silence, as Joe Johnson slunk back, desperate with rage,
yet unable to deny, was broken by Jack Wonnell's unthinking
interjection:
"Whoop, Jimmy! Hooraw for Prencess Anne!"
"An' why did I git that egg an' make you smell it, Joe Johnson? Because,
by smoke! you was a stinkin' kidnapper, robbing of the pore free
niggers of their liberty, knowin' that they didn't carry no arms and
couldn't make no good defense! That's your trade, an' it's the meanest
an' most cowardly in the world. It's doin' what the Algerynes does in
fair fighting. You're a fine American citizen, ain't you? I know your
gang, and a bloody one it is, but you can't look a white man in the eye,
because you're a thief and a coward!"
The Hellenic nature of the bay captain had never displayed itself to the
Judge with this fulness, and he felt some natural admiration as he took
Phoebus by the arm.
"Well, well!" said the Judge, "let him go now, Phoebus! Mr. Johnson,
don't let me see you in Princess Anne again to-day. Continue your
journey and disturb us no more, or I shall put criminal process upon
you, and you see we have stout constables in Somerset."
As he led Phoebus around the corner of the bank, the Judge said:
"James, my wife is so sick that I must keep house with her this morning,
and I want a little note left at the church for Mr. Tilghman. Will you
take it?"
"Why, with pleasure, Judge," the nonchalant villager replied. "I don't
look very handsome in the 'piscopal church, but I'll do a' arrand."
As the Judge wrote the note with his gold pencil on a leaf of his
memorandum book, he said:
"James, did you identify that man yesterday?"
"Yes, I knowed him as soon as he come to the tavern. This mornin',
seein' of him around town, I was afear'd Samson Hat would stumble on
him, and the nigger buyer would kill him for yisterday's blow. Thinks I:
'Samson is too white a nigger to be killed that way, by smoke!' but the
prejudice agin a nigger hittin' a white man is sich in this state that
Joe Johnson, bloody as he is, would never have stretched hemp for Samson
Hat; so I picked a quarrel with the nigger buyer to take the fight out
of him before Samson should come. He won't fight nobody now in this
town. _His_ hokey-pokey is done _yer_."
"You took a great risk, Phoebus. He is such an evil fellow in his
resentments, that I let him hide and eat in my quarters for fear of some
ill requital if I refused. That gang of Patty Cannon's is the curse of
the Eastern Shore."
"And if you'll pardon a younger and a porer man, Judge, it's jest sich
gentlemen as you that lets it go on. You politicians give them people
'munity, an' let 'em alone because they fight fur you in 'lection times
an' air popular with foresters an' pore trash, because they persecutes
niggers an' treats to liquor. You know the laws is agin their actions on
both sides of the Delaware line, but in Maryland they're a dead letter."
"You speak plain truth, James Phoebus, brave as your conduct. But the
poor men must make a sentiment against these kidnappers, because among
the ignorant poor they find their defenders and equals."
"Judge," the pungy captain said, "they'se a-makin' a pangymonum of all
the destreak about Patty Cannon's. By smoke! it's a shame to liberty. In
open day they lead free niggers, men, wimmin, an' little children, too,
to be sold, who's free as my mommy and your daughter."
Judge Custis thought painfully of the scant freedom his daughter now
enjoyed. Jimmy Phoebus continued:
"Now yer, we're raising hokey-pokey about the Algerynes and the
Trypollytins capturin' of a few Christian people an' sellin' of 'em to
Turkey, an' about the Turkey people makin' slaves of the Christian Greek
folks. Henry Clay is cuttin' a big splurge about it. Money is bein'
raised all over the country to send it to 'em. Commodo' Decatur was a
big man for a-breakin' of it up. By smoke! they're sellin' more free
people to death and hell along Mason and Dixon's line, than up the whole
buzzum of the Mediterranean Sea."
The brown-skinned speaker was more excited now than he had been during
all the collision with Joe Johnson.
"Indeed, Phoebus, they have kidnapped several thousand people, the
Philadelphia abolitionists say, but the reports must be exaggerated. The