The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
Johnson's Cross-roads! Git up thar, gal, an' let me see what ails you."
The woman rose mechanically, still singing in the shrill, cracked, weary
drone, and, as she rose, the baby awoke and began to cry, and she
stooped and took it up, and, patting it with her hands, sang on, as if
she would fall asleep singing, but could not.
The chain, strong and rusty, had been very recently welded to her feet
by a blacksmith; the fresh rivet attested that, and there were also
pieces of charcoal in the pine strewings, as if fire had been brought
there for smith's uses. Jimmy Phoebus took hold of the chain and
examined it link by link till it depended from a powerful staple driven
to the heart of the pine-tree; though rusty, it was perfect in every
part, and the condition of the staple showed that it was permanently
retained in its position, as if to secure various and successive
persons, while the staple itself had been driven above the reach of the
hands, as by a man standing on some platform or on another's shoulders.
Phoebus took the chain in his short, powerful arms, and, giving a
little run from the root of the tree, threw all the strength of his
compact, heavy body into a jerk, and let his weight fall upon it, but
did not produce the slightest impression.
"There's jess two people can unfasten this chain," exclaimed Jimmy,
blowing hard and kneading his palms, after two such exertions, "one of
em's a blacksmith and t'other's a woodchopper. Gal, how did you git
yer?"
The woman, a young and once comely person of about twenty-eight years of
age, sang on a moment as if she did not understand the question, till
Phoebus repeated it with a kinder tone:
"Pore, abused creatur, tell me as your friend! I ain't none of these
kidnappers. Git your pore, scattered wits together an tell a friend of
all women an' little childern how he kin help you, fur time's worth a
dollar a second, an' bloody vultures are nigh by. Speak, Mary!"
The universal name seemed timely to this woman; she stopped her chanting
and burst into tears.
"My husband brought me here," she said, between her long sobs. "He sold
me. I give him everything I had and loved him, too, and he sold me--me
and my baby."
"I reckon you don't belong fur down this way, Mary? You don't talk like
it."
"No, sir; I belong to Philadelphia. I was a free woman and a widow; my
husband left me a little money and a little house and this child;
another man come and courted me, a han'some mulatto man, almost as white
as you. He told me he had a farm in Delaware, and wanted me to be his
wife; he promised me so much and was so anxious about it, that I
listened to him. Oh, he was a beautiful talker, and I was lonesome and
wanted love. I let him sell my house and give him the money, and started
a week ago to come to my new home. Oh, he did deceive me so; he said he
loved me dearly."
She began to cry again, and her mind seemed to wander, for the next
sentence was disconnected. Jimmy took the baby in his arms and kissed it
without any scruples, and the child's large, black eyes looked into his
as if he might be its own father, while he dandled it tenderly.
"The foxes has come an' barked at me two nights," said the woman; "they
wanted the bacon, I 'spect. The water-snakes has crawled around here in
the daytime, and the buzzards flew right down before me and looked up,
as if they thought I ought to be dead. But I wasn't afraid: that man I
give my love to was so much worse than them, that I just sung and let
them look at me."
"You say he sold you, Mary?"
The woman rubbed her weary eyes and slowly recollected where she had
left off.
"We moved our things on a vessel to Delaware, and come up a creek to a
little town in the marshes, and there we started for my husband's farm.
He said we had come to it in the night. I couldn't tell, but I saw a
house in the woods, and was so tired I went to sleep with my baby there,
and in the night I found men in the room, and one of them, a white man,
was tying my feet."
A crow cawed with a sound of awe in the pine tops, and squirrels were
running tamely all round about as she hesitated.
"I thought then of the kidnappers of Delaware, for I had heard about
them, and I jumped out of bed and fought for my life. They knocked me
down and the rope around my feet tripped me up; but I fought with my
teeth after my hands was tied, too, and I bit that white man's knees,
and then he picked up a fire-shovel, or something of iron, and knocked
my teeth out. My last hope was almost gone when I saw my husband coming
in, and I cried to him, 'Save me! save me, darling!' He had a rope in
his hand, and, before I could understand it, he had slipped it over my
neck and choked me."
"Your own husband? I can't believe it, to save my life!"
"I didn't believe it, neither, till I heard him say, when they loosened
the slipknot that had strangled me--the voice was his I had trusted so
much; I never could forget it!--'Eben,' he said, 'I've took down every
mole and spot on her body and can swear to' em, for I've learned 'em by
heart, and you won't have no trouble a-sellin' her, as she can't
testify."
"The imp of Pangymonum!" Jimmy cried. "He had married you to note down
your marks, and by' em swear you to be a slave!"
"The white man tried to sell me to a farmer, and then I told what I had
heard them say. He believed me, and told them the mayor of Philadelphia
had a reward out for them, for kidnappin' free people, already. Then
they talked together--a little scared they was--and tied me again, and
brought me on a cart through the woods to the river and fetched me here,
and chained me, and told me if I ever said I was free, to another man,
they meant to sell my baby and to drown me in the river."
She finished with a chilly tremor and a low wail like an infant, but the
sailor passed her baby into her arms to engage her, and said:
"The Lord is still a-countin' of his sparrows, or I wouldn't have been
on this arrand, by smoke! To drift yer, hangin' senseless to that ole
scow, must have been to save you, Mary. This is a island where they
chains up property, I reckon, that is bein' follered up too close.
Time's very precious, Mary, but I've got a sailor's knife yer, an' I'll
stay to cut the staple out o' this ole pine if they come an' kill me.
You take an' wash my face off outen that water-trough while I bite a bit
of the bacon."
He took the child again and amused it while the woman carefully cleaned
his wound and rebandaged it so that he could breathe and see and eat,
though the cotton folds wrapped in much of his face like a mask. He then
examined the chain again, especially where it was rivetted at the feet,
and lifted a large iron ball weighing several pounds, which was also
affixed to her ankle, so that she could not climb the tree. Her ankle he
found blistered by the red-hot rivet being smithed so barbarously close
to the flesh.
"Don't leave me, oh! don't leave me here to die," the woman pleaded, as
he started into the woods.
"I'll stay by you an' we'll die together, if we must; but it's not my
idee to die at all, Mary. I'm goin' to bring that air scow ashore while
I cut a hickory, if I can find one, to break this yer chain."
Plunging again into the mud nearly to his waist, Phoebus pulled the
scow up into the woods, and had barely concealed himself when he saw
come out of the creek below Twiford's house a cat-boat like the
_Ellenora Dennis_, and stand towards the island in the cripple.
"The tide's agin' em, an' they must make a tack to get yer," Jimmy
muttered; "but I'm afraid this knife will have to go to the heart of
some son of Pangymonum in ten minutes, or Ellenory Dennis never agin be
pestered by her ugly lover."
He was seized with a certain frenzy of strength and discernment at the
danger he was in, and, as he carried the scow onward and across the
woodland island, heavy as it was, he also noted a single small hickory
tree on that farther margin, and threw himself against it and bent it
down, and plunged his knife into the straining fibres so that it
crackled and splintered in his hand. He leaped to the tree and scaled it
as he had often climbed a mast, and he thrust the sapling under the
staple, trimming the point down with the knife as he clutched the tree
by his knees, and then, catching the young hickory like a lever, he
dropped down the pine trunk and got his shoulder under the sapling and
brought the weight of his body desperately against it. The staple bent
upward in the tree, but did not loosen.
At that instant the scraping of a boat upon the mud was heard, and the
black woman fell upon her knees.
"Pray, but do it soft," Jimmy whispered; "an' not a cry from the child,
or there'll be a murder!"
He had rapidly trimmed the hickory stem of its branches while he spoke,
so that it could penetrate the arborage of the tree from above, and
climbing higher, like a cat, he worked the point of the lever downwards
into the now crooked staple, and threw himself out of the tree against
the sapling, which bent like a bow nearly double, but would not break,
and, as the staple yielded and flew out, the chain and the deliverer
fell together on the soft pine litter.
"Hark!" exclaimed a voice through the woods.
"What was it?" asked another voice.
"Come!" Phoebus murmured, and gathered together the woman, the child,
and the chain and ball, and stepped, long and silent as a rabbit's
leaps, through the awe-hushed pines, carrying the whole burden on his
shoulders.
He sat them in the scow, which sank to the edges, and, covered by a
protruding point of woods, pushed off into the deep river, yet guiding
the frail vessel in to the sides of the stream, away from the influence
of the out-running tide. As the scow turned the first crease or elbow in
the river, it began to sink.
"If you make a sound you are a slave fur life," whispered the waterman,
as he slipped overboard and began to swim, with his hand upon the stern.
As he did this, straining every muscle of his countenance to keep
afloat, the wound in his cheek began to bleed again, and he felt his
strength going. Down, down he began to settle, till the water reached
his nostrils, and the woman heard him sigh as he was sinking:
"I'd do it--an' die--agin--fur--Ellenory. God bless her!"
The scow, now full of water, turned upside down, and threw mother and
child into the stream, and the child was gone beneath the surface before
the woman could catch herself upon a sunken branch of an imbedded tree;
and, as she gasped there, the body of the pungy captain swept past her
and she caught him by the hair, and he clutched her with the drowning
instinct, and down they went together, like husband and wife, in
nature's contempt of distinctions between living worms.
They went down to the very bottom, but not to drown; for the old tree,
having fallen where it grew in other years, was sustained upon its
limbs, and made an invisible yet sure pathway to the shore. The long
chain and the iron ball fettered to the colored woman's foot, however,
deprived her for a few moments of all power to step along the slippery,
submerged trunk, and, with her soul full of agony for her child, which
she no longer saw, she was about to let go of her deliverer's body and
throw herself also into the river, to die with them, when the old scow,
having emptied itself of the water, reappeared at the surface and struck
the woman a buoyant blow that altered the course of her thought.
"Pore, brave man," the woman gasped. "He's got a wife, maybe. He said,
'God bless her,' an' he give his life for a poor creature like me. God
has took my baby. I can't do nothing for it now, but maybe I can save
this man's life before I die."
Indifferent to her personal fate, she drew intelligence from her spirit