The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
No answer was made for a minute, and then Dave said, in a low,
frightened voice, as he stole a glance at both of his companions out of
his fiery, scarred eyes:
"Kidnappin', I 'spect."
"It's everything that makes Pangymonum," Jimmy Phoebus explained;
"that old woman, Patty Cannon, has spent the whole of a wicked life, by
smoke!--or ever sence she came to Delaware from Cannady, as the bride of
pore Alonzo Cannon--a-makin' robbers an' bloodhounds out of the young
men she could git hold of. Some of' em she sets to robbin' the mails,
some to makin' an' passin' of counterfeit money, but most of 'em she
sets at stealin' free niggers outen the State of Delaware; and, when
it's safe, they steal slaves too. She fust made a tool of Ebenezer
Johnson, the pirate of Broad Creek, an' he died in his tracks a-fightin
fur her. Then she took hold of his sons, Joe Johnson an' young Ebenezer,
an' made 'em both outlaws an' kidnappers, an' Joe she married to her
daughter, when Bruington, her first son-in-law, had been hanged. When
Samson Hat, who is the whitest nigger I ever found, knocked Joe Johnson
down in Princess Anne, the night before last, he struck the worst man in
our peninsula."
Dave listened to this recital with such a deep interest that his breath,
strong with apple whiskey, came short and hot, and his hands trembled as
he guided the horses. At the last words, he exclaimed:
"Samson knocked Joe Johnson down? Den de debbil has got him, and means
to pay him back!"
"What's that?" cried Jimmy Phoebus.
The sweat stood on the big slave's forehead, as if his imagination was
terribly possessed, but before he could explain Mrs. Custis interrupted:
"I think it was said that old Patty Cannon corrupted Jake Purnell, who
cut his throat at Snow Hill five years ago. He was a free negro who
engaged slaves to steal other slaves and bring them to him, and he
delivered them up to the white kidnappers for money; and nobody could
account for his prosperity till a negro who had been beaten to death was
found in the Pocomoke River, and three slaves who had been seen in his
company were arrested for the murder. They confessed that they had
stolen the dead negro and he had escaped from them, and was so beaten
with clubs, to make him tractable, that when they gave him to Purnell
his life was all gone. Then he was thrown in the river, but his body
came up after sinking, and the confession of the wretched tools
explained to the slave-owners where all their missing negroes had gone.
They marched and surrounded Purnell's hut, and he was discovered
burrowed beneath it. They brought the dogs, and fire to drive him out,
and as he came out he cut his throat with desperate slashes from ear to
ear."
During this narrative the man Dave had listened with rising nervous
excitement, rolling his eyes as if in strong inward torment, till the
concluding words inspired such terror in him that he dropped the reins,
threw back his head, and shouted, with large beads of sweat all round
his brow:
"Mercy! mercy! Have mercy! Save me, oh, my Lord!"
"He's got a fit, I reckon," cried Jimmy Phoebus, promptly grasping the
reins as the horses started at the cry, and with his leg pinning Dave to
the carriage-seat. At that moment the road descended into the hollow of
Barren Creek, and, leaping down at the old Mineral Springs Hotel, a
health resort of those days, Phoebus humanely procured water and
freshened up the gasping negro's face.
"I declare, I am almost afraid to trust myself to this man," Mrs. Custis
observed, with more distaste than trepidation.
"Every nigger in this region," exclaimed Jimmy Phoebus, "thinks
Pangymonum's comin' down at the dreaded name of Patty Cannon; an' this
nigger's gone most to ruin, any way."
"Oh, marster," exclaimed the slave, recovering his speech and glaring
wildly around, "I hain't been always the pore sinner rum an' fightin'
has made of me. I served the Lord all my youth; I praised his name an'
kept the road to heaven; an' thinkin' of the shipwreck I'se made of a
good conscience, an' hearin' missis tell of the end of Jake Purnell, it
made me yell to de good Lord for mercy, mercy, oh, my soul!"
His frightful agitation increased, and Jimmy Phoebus soothed him,
good-naturedly saying:
"Mrs. Custis, I reckon you'd better let him come in the tavern and take
a little sperits; it'll strengthen his nerves an' make him drive
better."
As they drank at the old summer-resort bar, at that time in the height
of its celebrity, and the only _spa_ on the peninsula, south of the
Brandywine Springs, Phoebus spoke low to the negro:
"Dave, somethin' not squar and fair is a-workin' yer, by smoke! I've got
my eye on you, nigger, an' sure as hokey-pokey thair it'll stay. You
know my arrand yer, Dave: to save a pore, ignorant, deluded black woman
from Joe Johnson's band. Now, you've been a-cryin 'Mercy!' I want you to
show mercy by a-tellin' of me whar I'm to overtake an' sarch Levin
Dennis's cat-boat if it comes up the Nanticoke to-night with them people
and Joe Johnson aboard!"
Having swallowed his liquor greedily, the colored man replied, with his
former lowering countenance and evasive eyes:
"You can't do nothin' as low down de river as Vienny, 'case de Nanticoke
is too wide dar, and if you cross it at Vienny ferry, den you got de
Norfwest Fork between you and Johnson's Cross-roads, wid one ferry over
dat, at Crotcher's, an' Joe Johnson owns all dat place. But you kin keep
up dis side o' de Nanticoke, Marster Phoebus, de same distance as from
yer to Vienny, to de pint whar de Norfwest Fork come in. Sometimes Joe
Johnson sails up dat big fork to get to his cross-roads. In gineral he
keeps straight up de oder fork to Betty Twiford's wharf, right on de
boundary line."
"How far is that?"
"It's five miles from yer to Vienny, and five miles from yer to a
landin' opposite de Norfwest Fork. Four miles furder on you're at
Sharptown, an' dar you can see Betty Twiford's house on de bank two
miles acrost de Nanticoke."
"Nine miles, then, to Sharptown! He's had the tide agin him since he
entered the Nanticoke, and it's not turned yit. By smoke! I'll look for
a conveyance!"
"You can ride with me to the first landing," spoke up a noble-looking
man, whip in hand; "and after delaying a little there, I shall go on the
Sharptown ferry and cross the river."
Phoebus accepted the invitation immediately, and cautioning Mrs.
Custis to speak with less freedom in that part of the country, he bade
her adieu, and took the vacant seat in the stranger's buggy.
When Mrs. Custis came to Vienna ferry, and the horses and carriage went
on board the scow to be rowed to the little, old, shipping settlement of
that name, the negro Dave, standing at the horses' heads, exchanged a
few sentences with the ferry-keeper.
"Dave," called Mrs. Custis, a little later on, "you have no love, I see,
for old Samson."
"He made a boxer outen me an' a bad man, missis."
"Do you know the man he works for--Meshach Milburn?"
"No, missis. I never see him."
"He wears a peculiar hat--nothing like gentlemen's hats nowadays: it is
a hat out of a thousand."
"I never did see it, missis."
"You cannot mistake it for any other hat in the world. Now, Samson is
the only servant and watchman at Mr. Milburn's store, and he attends to
that disgraceful hat. If you can ever get it from him, Dave, and destroy
it, you will be doing a useful act, and I will reward you well."
The moody negro looked up from his remorseful, brutalized orbs, and
said:
"Steal it?"
"Oh, no, I do not advise a theft, David--though such a wretched hat can
have no legal value. It is an affliction to my daughter and Judge Custis
and all of us, and you might find some way to destroy it--that is all."
"I'll git it some day," the negro muttered; and drove into the old
tobacco-port of Vienna.
CHAPTER XXII.
NANTICOKE PEOPLE.
A map would be out of place in a story, yet there are probably some who
perceive that this is a story with a reality; and if such will take any
atlas and open it at the "Middle States" of the American republic, they
will see that the little State of Delaware is fitted as nicely into a
square niche of Maryland as if it were a lamp, or piece of statuary,
standing on a mantelpiece. It stands there on a mantelshelf about forty
miles wide, and rises to more than three times that height, making a
perfectly straight north and south line at right angles with its base.
Thus mortised into Maryland, its ragged eastern line is formed of the
Atlantic Ocean and the broad Delaware Bay.
The only considerable river within this narrow strip or _Hermes_ of a
state is the Nanticoke, which, like a crack in the wall,--and the same
blow fractured the image on the mantel,--flows with breadth and tidal
ebb and flow from the Chesapeake Bay through the Eastern Shore of
Maryland into Delaware, and is there formed of two tidal sources, the
one to the north continuing to be called the Nanticoke, and that to the
south--nearly as imposing a stream--named Broad Creek.
Nature, therefore, as if anticipating some foolish political boundaries
on the part of man, prepared one drain and channel of ingress at the
southwestern corner of Delaware to the splendid bay of Virginia.
Around that corner of the little Delaware commonwealth, in a flat, poor,
sandy, pine-grown soil, Jimmy Phoebus rode by the stranger in the
afternoon of October, with the sun, an hour high in the west, shining
upon his dark, Greekish cheeks and neck, and he hearing the fall birds
whistle and cackle in the mellowing stubble and golden thickets.
The meadow-lark, the boy's delight, was picking seed, gravel, and
insects' eggs in the fields--large and partridge-like, with breast
washed yellow from the bill to the very knees, except at the throat,
where hangs a brilliant reticule of blackish brown; his head and back
are of hawkish colors--umber, brown, and gray--and in his carriage is
something of the gamecock. He flies high, sometimes alone, sometimes in
the flock, and is our winter visitor, loving the old fields improvidence
has abandoned, and uttering, as he feeds, the loud sounds of challenge,
as if to cry, "Abandoned by man; pre-empted by me!"
Jimmy Phoebus also heard the bold, bantering woodpecker, with his red
head, whose schoolmaster is the squirrel, and whose tactics of keeping a
tree between him and his enemy the Indian fighters adopted. He mimics
the tree-frog's cry, and migrates after October, like other
voluptuaries, who must have the round year warm, and fruit and eggs
always in market. Dressed in his speckled black swallow-tail coat, with
his long pen in his mouth and his shirt-bosom faultlessly white, the
woodpecker works like some Balzac in his garret, making the tree-top
lively as he spars with his fellow-Bohemians; and being sure himself of
a tree, and clinging to it with both tail and talons, he esteems
everything else that lives upon it to be an insect at which he may run
his bill or spit his tongue--that tongue which is rooted in the brain
itself.
In the hollow golden bowl of echoing evening the sailor noted, too, the
flicker, in golden pencilled wings and back of speckled umber and
mottled white breast, with coal-black collar and neck and head of
cinnamon. His golden tail droops far below his perch, and, running
downward along the tree-trunk, it flashes in the air like a sceptre over
the wood-lice he devours with his pickaxe bill. "Go to the ant, thou
sluggard!" was an instigation to murder in the flicker, who loves young
ants as much as wild-cherries or Indian corn, and is capable of taking
any such satire seriously upon things to eat. Not so elfin and devilish
as the small black woodpecker, he is full of bolder play.