The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
The redbird, like the unclaimed blood of Abel, flew to the little trees
that grew low, as if to cover Abel's altar; the jack-snipe chirped in
the swampy spots, like a divinity student, on his clean, long legs,
probing with his bill and critical eye the Scriptures of the fields; the
quail piped like an old bachelor with family cares at last, as he led
his mate where the wild seeds were best; and through the air darted
voices of birds forsaken or on doctor's errands, crying "Phoebe?
Phoebe?" or "Killed he! killed he!"
"Are you a dealer?" asked the gentleman of Jimmy Phoebus.
"Just a little that way," said Jimmy, warily, "when I kin git somethin'
cheap."
The stranger had a pair of keen, dancing eyes, and a long, eloquent,
silver-gray face that might have suited a great general, so fine was
its command, and yet too narrowly dancing in the eyes, like spiders in a
well, disturbing the mirror there.
"Ha!" chuckled the man, as if his eyes had chuckled, so poorly did that
sound represent his lordly stature and look of high spirit--"ha! that's
what brings them all to my neighbor Johnson: a fair quotient!"
"Quotient?" repeated Jimmy.
"Johnson's a great factor hereabout," continued the military-looking
man, bending his handsome eyes on the bay captain, as if there was a
business secret between them, and peering at once mischievously and
nobly; "he makes the quotient to suit. He leaves the suttle large and
never stints the cloff."
"He don't narry a feller down to the cloth he's got, sir?" assented
Jimmy, dubiously.
"Why should he? His equation is simple: I suppose you know what it is."
"Not ezackly," answered Phoebus, pricking up his ears to learn.
"Well, it is force and class sympathy against a dead quantity: laws
which have no consignees, cattle which have no lawyer and no tongue,
rights which have lapsed by their assertion being suspended, till demand
and supply, like a pair of bulldogs, tear what is left to pieces. Armed
with his _ca. sa._, my neighbor Johnson offsets everybody's _fi. fa._,
serves his writ the first, and makes to gentlemen like you a
satisfactory quotient. But he cuts no capers with Isaac and Jacob
Cannon!"
"I expect now that you are Jacob Cannon?" remarked the tawny sailor, not
having understood a word of what preceded. "If that's the case, I'm glad
to know your name, and thank you for givin' me this lift."
By a bare nod, just intelligible, Mr. Cannon signified that the guess
would do; and still meditating aloud in his small, grand way,
continued:
"We let neighbor Johnson and his somewhat peculiar mother-in-law make
such commerce as suits him, provided he studies to give us no
inconvenience. That is his equation; with his quotient we have no
concern other than our slight interest in his wastage, as when Madame
Cannon rides down to change a bill and leaves an order for
supplies--rum, chiefly, I believe. Gentlemen like you come into this
country to deal, replevin, or what not, and we say to you all, 'Don't
tread on us--that is all.' We shall not look into your parcels, nor lie
awake of nights to hear alarms; but harm Isaac and Jacob Cannon one
ha'pence and _levari facias, fi. fa.!_"
"And fee-fo-fum," ejaculated Jimmy, cheerfully; "I've hearn it before."
Looking again with some curiosity at his companion, Phoebus saw that
he was not beyond fifty years of age, of a spare, lofty figure--at least
six feet four high--sitting straight and graceful as an Indian, his
clothes well-tailored, his countenance and features both stern and
refined; every feature perfected, and all keen without being hard or
angular--and yet Jimmy did not like him. There seemed to have been made
a commodore or a general--some one designed for deeds of chivalry and
great philanthropy; and yet around and between the dancing eyes spider
lines were drawn, as if the fine high brain of Jacob Cannon had put
aside matters that matched it and meddled with nothing that ascended
higher above the world than the long white bridge of his nose. His
sentiments apparently fell no further towards his heart than that; his
brain belonged to the bridge of his nose.
"Another Meshach Milburn, by smoke!" concluded Jimmy.
After a little pause Phoebus inquired into the character of the people
in this apparently new region of country.
"The quotient of much misplanting and lawyering is the lands on the
Nanticoke," spoke the gray-nosed Apollo; "the piece of country directly
before us, in the rear of my neighbor Johnson's cross-roads, was an old
Indian reservation for seventy years, and so were three thousand acres
to our right, on Broad Creek. The Indian is a bad factor to civilize his
white neighbors; he does not know the luxury of the law, that grand
contrivance to make the equation between the business man and the herd.
Ha, ha!"
Mr. Cannon chuckled as if he, at least, appreciated the law, and turned
the fine horsy bridge of his nose, all gray with dancing eyelight,
enjoyingly upon Mr. Phoebus.
"The Indians were long imposed upon, and when they went away, at the
brink of the Revolutionary War, they left a demoralized white race; and
others who moved in upon the deserted lands of the Nanticokes were, if
possible, more Indian than the Indians. This peninsula never produced a
great Indian, but when Ebenezer Johnson settled on Broad Creek it
possessed a greater savage than Tecumseh. He took what he wanted and
appealed to nature, like the Indian. He stole nothing; he merely took
it. He served, with anything convenient, from his fists to a
blunderbuss, his _fi. fa._ and his _ca. sa._ upon wondering but
submissive mankind. Need I say that this was before the perfect day of
Isaac and Jacob Cannon?"
"They would have socked it to him, I reckon," Jimmy exclaimed,
consonantly.
Mr. Jacob Cannon gave a tender smile, such as the gray horse emits at
the prospect of oats, and continued:
"Such was the multiplicand to make the future race. Here, too, raged the
boundary-line debate between Penns and Calverts, with occasional raids
and broken heads, and a noble suit in chancery of fifty years, till no
man's title was known, and, instead of improving their lands, our
voluptuous predecessors improved chiefly their opportunities. You cut
sundry cords of wood and hauled it to the landing, and Ebenezer Johnson
coolly scowed it over to his paradise at the mouth of Broad Creek. You
had a little parcel of negroes, but the British war-ships, in two
successive wars, lay in the river mouth and beckoned them off. Having no
interest in any certain property, the foresters of the Nanticoke would
rather trade with the enemy than fight for foolish ideas; and so this
region was more than half Tory, and is still half passive, the other
half predatory. To neither half of such a quotient belongs the house of
Isaac and Jacob Cannon!"
His nostrils swelled a trifle with military spirit, and he raised the
bridge of his nose delicately, turning to observe his instinctive
companion.
"If it's any harm I won't ask it," the easy-going mariner spoke, "but
air you two Cannons ary kin to ole Patty Cannon?"
Mr. Cannon smiled.
"In Adam all sinned--there we may have been connected," he said. "The
question you ask may one day be actionable, sir. The Cannons are a
numerous people in our region, of fair substance, such as we have, but
they showed nothing to vary the equation of subsistence here till there
arose the mother of Isaac and Jacob Cannon. She was a remarkable woman;
unassisted, she procured the charter for Cannon's Ferry, and made the
port settlement of that name by the importance her ferry acquired; and
when she died there were found in her house nine hundred dollars in
silver--for she never would take any paper money--the earnings of that
sequestered ferry, to start her sons on their career. She knew the
peculiar character of some of her neighbors--how lightly _meum_ and
_tuum_ sat upon their fears or consciences--but she kept no guard except
her own good gray eyes and dauntless heart over that accumulating pile
of little sixpences, for there was but one spirit as bold as she in all
this region of the world--"
"And that, I reckon," observed Jimmy Phoebus, "was ole Patty Cannon
herself."
Mr. Jacob Cannon slightly bowed his head, and spoke aloud from an inner
communion:
"Forgive me, mother, that I make the comparison! Thy frugal oil, that
burned with pure and lonely widow's flame at Cannon's Ferry window, the
traveller hailed with comfort in his heart, and blessed the enterprise.
But to compound the equation another unknown quantity of female force
arose beside my mother's lamp. A certain young Cannon, distantly of our
stock, must needs go see the world, and he returned with a fair demon of
a bride, and settled, too, at Cannon's Ferry. He lived to see the
wondrous serpent he had warmed in his arms, and died, they say, of the
sting. But she lived on, and, shrinking back into the woods to a little
farm my mother's sons rented to her, she lighted there a
Jack-o'-the-lantern many a traveller has pursued who never returned to
tell. With Ebenezer Johnson's progeny and her own siren sisters, who
followed Madame Cannon to the Nanticoke, the nucleus of a settlement
began, and has existed for twenty years, that only the Almighty's
_venire facias_ can explore."[2]
"That's my arrand, Jacob Cannon," quietly remarked Jimmy Phoebus. "I'm
a pore man from Prencess Anne. If you took me for a nigger-dealer you
did me as pore a compliment as when I asked if you was Patty Cannon's
kin. But I have got just one gal to love and just one life to lose, an'
if God takes me thar, I'm a-goin' to Johnson's Cross-roads."
Mr. Jacob Cannon turned and examined his companion with some twinkling
care, but showed no personal concern.
"Every man must be his own security, my dark-skinned friend, till he can
find a bailsman. That place I never take--neither the debtor's nor the
security. The firm of Isaac and Jacob Cannon allows no trespass, and
further concern themselves not. But we are at the Nanticoke."
"I'm obliged to you for the lift, Mr. Jacob Cannon," said Jimmy,
springing down, "and hope you may never find it inconvenient to have let
such a pack of wolves use your neighborhood to trespass on human natur."
CHAPTER XXIII.
TWIFORD'S ISLAND.
Some piles of wood and an old wharf were at the river-side, and a little
scow, half filled with water, and with only a broken piece of paddle in
it, was the only boat the pungy captain could find. The merchant's buggy
was soon out of sight, and the wide, gray Nanticoke, several hundred
yards wide, and made wider by a broad river that flowed into it through
low bluffs and levels immediately opposite, was receiving the strong
shadows of approaching night, and the tide was running up it violent and
deep.
Long lines of melancholy woods shut both these rivers in; an osprey
suddenly struck the surface of the water, like a drowning man, and rose
as if it had escaped from some demon in the flood; the silence
following his plunge was deeper than ever, till a goatsucker,
noiselessly making his zigzag chase, cried, as if out of eternal gloom,
his solemn command to "_Whip_ poor Will." Those notes repeated--as by
some slave ordering his brother to be lashed or one sympathetic soul in
perdition made the time-caller to another's misery--floated on the
evening light as if the oars of Charon echoed on the Styx, and broken
hearts were crossing over.
Alone, unintimidated, but not altogether comfortable, Jimmy Phoebus
proceeded to bail out the old scow, and wished he had accepted one of
Jack Wonnell's hats to do the task, and, when he had finished it, the
stars and clouds were manoeuvring around each other in the sky, with
the clouds the more aggressive, and finally some drops of rain punctured