The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
the long, bare muscles of the inflowing tide, making a reticule of
little pittings, like a net of beads on drifting women's tresses. As
night advanced, a puffing something ascended the broad, black aisle of
this forest river, and slowly the Norfolk steamboat rumbled past, with
passengers for the Philadelphia stage. Then silence drew a sheet of fog
around herself and passed into a cold torpor of repose, affected only by
the waves that licked the shores with intermittent thirst.
The waterman, regretting a little that he had not taken his stand at
Vienna, where human assistance might have been procured, and thinking
that the poison airs might also afflict him with Meshach Milburn's
complaints, fought sleep away till midnight, straining his eyes and ears
ever and anon for signs of some sail; but nothing drew near, and he had
insensibly closed his lids and might have soon been in deep sleep, but
that he suddenly heard, between his dreams and this world, something
like a little baby moaning in the night.
He sat up in the damp scow, where he had been lying, and listened with
all his senses wide open, and once again the cry was wafted upon the
river zephyrs, and before it died away the sailor's paddle was in the
water, and his frail, awkward vessel was darting across the tide.
He saw, in the black night, what none but a sailor's eyes would have
seen, a thing not visible, but divined, coming along on the bosom of the
river; and his ears saw it the clearer as that little cry continued--now
stopped, now stifled, now rising, now nearly piercing; and then there
was a growl, momentary and loud, and a rattle as of feet over wood, and
a stroke or thud, or heavy concussion, and then a white thing rose up
against the universal ink and rushed on the little scow, sucking water
as it came--the cat-boat under full sail.
Phoebus had paddled for the opposite shore of the river to prevent the
object of his quest escaping up the Northwest Fork, yet to be in its
path if it beat up the main fork, and, by a piece of instinctive
calculation, he had run nearly under the cat-boat bows.
"Ahoy, there!" cried Jimmy, standing up in his tipsy little skiff; "ahoy
the _Ellenory Dennis!_ I'm a-comin' aboard."
And with this, the paddle still in his hand, and his knees and feet
nearly sentient in their providence of uses, the sailor threw himself
upon the low gunwale, and let it glide through his palms till he could
see the man at the helm.
There was no light to be called so, but the helmsman was yet perceived
by the sailor's experienced eyes, and he grappled the gunwale firmer,
and, preparing to swing himself on board, shouted hoarsely,
"You Levin Dennis, I see you, by smoke! You know Jimmy Phoebus is your
friend, an' come out of this Pangymonum an' stop a-breakin' of your
mother's heart! Oh, I see you, my son!"
If he did see Levin Dennis, Levin did not see Jimmy Phoebus, nor
apparently hear him, but stood motionless at the helm as a frozen man,
looking straight on in the night. The rigging made a little flapping,
the rudder creaked on its hooks, but every human sound was still as the
grave now, and the boy at the helm seemed petrified and deaf and blind.
The pungy captain's temper rose, his superstition not being equal to
that of most people, and he cried again,
"You're a disgrace to the woman that bore you. Hell's a-waitin' for your
pore tender body an' soul. Heave ahoy an' let drop that gaff, an' take
me aboard, Levin!"
Still silent and passive as a stone, the youthful figure at the helm did
not seem to breathe, and the cat-boat cut the water like a fish-hawk.
A flash of bright fire lighted up the vessel's side, a loud pistol-shot
rang out, and the sailor's hands loosened from the gunwale and clutched
at the air, and he felt the black night fall on him as if he had pulled
down its ebony columns upon his head.
He knew no more for hours, till he felt himself lying in cold water and
saw the gray morning coming through tree-boughs over his head. He had a
thirsty feeling and pain somewhere, and for a few minutes did not move,
but lay there on his shoulder, holding to something and guessing what it
might be, and where he might be making his bed in this chilly autumn
dawn.
His hand was clutching the a-stern plank of the old scow, and was so
stiff he could not for some time open it. The scow was aground upon a
marshy shore, in which some large trees grew, and were the fringes of a
woods that deepened farther back.
"By smoke!" muttered Jimmy, "if yer ain't hokey-pokey. But I reckon I
ain't dead, nohow."
With this he lifted the other hand, that had been stretched beneath his
head, and was also numb with cramp and cold, and it was full of blood.
"Well," said Jimmy, "that feller did hit me; but, if he'll lend me his
pistol, I'll fire a straighter slug than his'n. I wonder where it is."
Feeling around his head, the captain came to a raw spot, the touch of
which gave him acute pain, and made the blood flow freshly as he
withdrew his hand, and he could just speak the words, "Water, or I'll--"
when he swooned away.
The sun was up and shining cheerily in the tree-tops as Phoebus, who
was its name-bearer, recovered his senses again, and he bathed his face,
still lying down, and tore a piece of his raiment off for a bandage,
and, by the mirror of a still, green pool of water, examined his wound,
which was in the fleshy part of his cheek--a little groove or gutter,
now choked with almost dried blood, where the ball had ploughed a line.
It had probably struck a bone, but had not broken it, and this had
stunned him.
"I was so ugly before that Ellenory wouldn't more than half look at me,"
Jimmy mused, "an' now, I 'spect, she'll never kiss that air cheek."
He then bandaged his cheek roughly, sitting up, and took a survey of the
scenery.
The river was here a full quarter of a mile wide, on the opposite shore
bluffy, and in places bold, but, on the side where Phoebus had drifted
with the tide, clutching his old scow with mortal grip, there extended a
point of level woods and marsh or "cripple," as if by the action of some
back-water, and this low ground appeared to have a considerable area,
and was nowhere tilled or fenced, or gave any signs of being visited.
But the opposite or northern shore was quite otherwise; there the river
had a wide bend or hollow to receive two considerable creeks, and
changed its course almost abruptly from west to southwest, giving a
grand view of its wide bosom for the distance of more than two miles
into Maryland; and the prospect was closed in that direction by a
whitish-looking something, like lime or shell piles, standing against
the background of pale blue woods and bluffs.
Right opposite the spot where Phoebus had been stranded, a cleared
farm came out to the Nanticoke, affording a front of only a single
field, on the crest of a considerable sand-bluff--elevations looking
magnified here, where nature is so level; and at one end of this field,
which was planted in corn that was now clinging dry to the naked stalks,
an old lane descended to a shell-paved wharf of a stumpy, square form;
and almost at the other, or western, end of the clearing stood a
respectable farm-house of considerable age, with a hipped roof and three
queer dormer windows slipping down the steeper half below, and two
chimneys, not built outside of the house, as was the general fashion,
but naturally rising out of the old English-brick gables. All between
the gables was built of wood; a porch of one story occupied nearly half
the centre of that side of the house facing the river; and to the right,
against the house and behind it, were kitchen, smoke-house, corn-cribs,
and other low tenements, in picturesque medley; while to the left
crouched an old, low building on the water's edge, looking like a
brandy-still or a small warehouse. The road from the wharf and lane
passed along a beach, and partly through the river water, to enter a
gate between this shed and the dwelling; and from the garden or lawn, on
the bluff before the latter, arose two tall and elegant trees, a
honey-locust and a stalwart mulberry.
"Now, I never been by this place before," Jimmy Phoebus muttered,
"but, by smoke! yon house looks to me like Betty Twiford's wharf, an',
to save my life, I can't help thinkin' yon white spots down this side of
the river air Sharptown. If that's the case, which state am I in?"
He rose to his feet, bailed the scow, which was nearly full of water,
and began to paddle along the shore, and, seeing something white, he
landed and parted the bushes, and found it to be a stone of a bluish
marble, bearing on one side the letter M, and on the other the letter P,
and a royal crown was also carved upon it.
"Yer's one o' Lord Baltimore's boundary stones," Phoebus exclaimed.
"Now see the rascality o' them kidnappers! Yon house, I know, is
Twiford's, because it's a'most on the state-line, but, I'm ashamed to
say, it's a leetle in Maryland. And that lane, coming down to the wharf,
is my way to Joe Johnson's Pangymonum at his cross-roads."
A sound, as of some one singing, seemed to come from the woods near by,
and Phoebus, listening, concluded that it was farther along the water,
so he paddled softly forward till a small cove or pool led up into the
swamp, and its shores nowhere offered a dry landing; yet there were
recent foot-marks deeply trodden in the bog, and disclosed up the slope
into the woods, and from their direction seemed to come the mysterious
chanting.
"My head's bloody and I'm wet as a musk-rat, so I reckon I ain't afraid
of gittin' a little muddy," and with this the navigator stepped from the
scow in swamp nearly to his middle, and pulled himself up the slope by
main strength.
"I believe my soul this yer is a island," Jimmy remarked; "a island
surrounded with mud, that's wuss to git to than a water island."
The tall trees increased in size as he went on and entered a noble grove
of pines, through whose roar, like an organ accompanied by a human
voice, the singing was heard nearer and nearer, and, following the track
of previous feet, which had almost made a path, Phoebus came to a
space where an axe had laid the smaller bushes low around a large
loblolly pine that spread its branches like a roof only a few feet from
the ground; and there, fastened by a chain to the trunk, which allowed
her to go around and around the tree, and tread a nearly bare place in
the pine droppings or "shats," sat a black woman, singing in a long,
weary, throat-sore wail. Jimmy listened to a few lines:
"Deep-en de woun' dy han's have made
In dis weak, helpless soul,
Till mercy wid its mighty aid
De-scen to make me whole;
Yes, Lord!
De-scen to make me whole."
A little negro child, perhaps three years old, was lying asleep on the
ground at the woman's feet, in an old tattered gray blanket that might
have been discarded from a stable. Near the child was a wooden box, in
which were a coarse loaf of corn-bread and some strips of bacon, and a
wooden trough, hollowed out of a log, contained water. The woman's face
was scratched and bruised, and, as she came to some dental sounds in her
chant, her teeth were revealed, with several freshly missing in front,
and her lips were swollen and the gums blistered and raw.
She glanced up as Phoebus came in sight, looked at him a minute in
blank curiosity, as if she did not know what kind of animal he was, and
then continued her song, wearily, as if she had been singing it for
days, and her mind had gone into it and was out of her control. As she
moved her feet from time to time, the chain rattled upon her ankles.
"Well," said Jimmy, "if this ain't Pangymonum, I reckon I'll find it at