The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
on the floor, and the table-knife fell with a ringing sound.
"Who's there?" cried a voice, and added, "I knew the dogs ought to be
loose."
"Who's there?" also asked the other voice, with something very familiar
to Phoebus in its sounds.
"E-b-e-n-e-z-e-r John-son!" answered Jimmy, in his deepest bass tones,
mentally considering that a ghost might carry more terror than a robber,
after that tale.
A little scream followed, and a whispered consultation, and then a
girl's bare feet, beautifully moulded, slowly descended the steep
stairway, and next a slender, graceful body came into view, and finally
a face, delicious as a ripe peach, looked once at the intruder below,
and all the pink and bright color faded from it to see, standing there,
where Ebenezer Johnson had given up the ghost, a stalwart effigy,
bandaged in white all round the head, and over the left eye and cheek,
where the dead river-pirate had received his double bullet, the blood
was hideously matted and not wholly stanched even yet. She sank slowly
down upon the steps and saw no more.
"Now, if I don't git out, the dogs will be set loose," muttered Jimmy,
as he disappeared up the farm-house lane and put the barn and pound
between him and the house; and scarcely had he done so when Levin Dennis
appeared coming down the stairs, all unconscious of the apparition, and,
finding the beautiful girl insensible, he raised her in his arms and
stole a kiss.
Paying for his one act of deceit by losing the principal object of his
quest, Jimmy Phoebus stopped a minute by Ebenezer Johnson's grave.
In a level field of deep sand--the soil here being the poorest in the
region--and between the cattle-pound and the pines, which were
everywhere jealous of their other indigenous brother, the Indian corn,
an old family burial-lot lay under some low cedar-trees, with wild berry
bushes growing all around. There were several little stones over
Twifords that had died early, and a large heap of sand, planted with
some flowers, that might have covered a favorite horse, but which
Phoebus believed was the resting-place of the river buccaneer; and
there was also a vault of brick and plaster, with the little door ajar,
where prurient visitors, themselves with Saul's own selfish curiosity to
raise the dead, had poked and peeped about until the coffin lids had
been drawn back and the dead pair exposed to the dry peninsular air.
The bay captain looked in and beheld his predecessor, Captain Twiford,
who also sailed the bay, lying in his shroud--not in full clothing, as
men are buried now, for clothing was too valuable in the scanty-peopled
country to feed it to the worms. Twiford lay shrivelled up, shroud and
flesh making but one skin, the face of a walnut color, the hair
complete, the teeth sound, and severe dignity unrelaxed by the exposure
he was condemned to for his evil alliance with Betty Hanley.
She also lay exposed, who had lived so shamelessly, respecting not the
mould of beauty God had given her, till now men leered to look upon her
nearly kiln-dried bosom glued into its winding-sheet, and the glory of
her hair, that had been handled by bantering outlaws, and in a rippling
wave of unbleached coal covered the grinning coquetry of her skull.
"Them that mocks God shall be mocked of him," said Jimmy Phoebus,
closing the door and putting some of the scattered bricks of the vault
against it. "Now, I reckon, I kin git to the cross-roads by a leetle
after dark."
CHAPTER XXV.
PATTY CANNON'S.
Phoebus passed along the side of a large, black, cypress-shaded
mill-pond, and found the boundary stone again, and took the angle from
its northern face as a compass-point, and, proceeding in that direction,
soon fell in with a sort of blind path hardly feasible for wheels, which
ran almost on the line between the states of Maryland and Delaware,
passing in sight of several of these old boundary stones. Not a dwelling
was visible as he proceeded, not even a clearing, not a stream except
one mere gutter in the sand, not a man, hardly an animal or a bird; the
monotonous sand-pines, too low to moan, too thick to expand, too dry to
give shade, yet grew and grew, like poor folks' sandy-headed children,
and kept company only with some scrubby oaks that had strayed that way,
till pine-cone and acorn seemed to have bred upon each other, and the
wild hogs disdained the progeny.
"Maybe I'll git killed up yer in this Pangymonum," Jimmy reflected; "an'
though I 'spose it don't make no difference whair you plant your bones,
I don't want to grow up into ole pines. Good, big, preachin' kind of
pines, that's a little above the world, an' says 'Holy, rolley,
melancho-ly, mind your soul-y'--I could go into their sap and shats
fust-rate. But to die yer an' never be found in these desert wastes is
pore salvage for a man that's lived among the white sails of the bay,
an' loved a woman elegant as Ellenory."
It was dark, and he could hardly see his way in half an hour. Sometimes
a crow would caw, to hear strange sounds go past, like an old
watchman's rattle moved one cog. The stars became bright, however, and
the moon was new, and when Phoebus came to a large cleared opening in
the pines, the lambent heavens broke forth and bathed the sandy fields
with silver, and showed a large, high house at the middle of the
clearing, with outside chimneys, one thicker than the other, and a porch
of two stories facing the east.
Though not a large dwelling, it was large for those days and for that
unfrequented region, and its roof seemed to Phoebus remarkably steep
and long, and yet, while enclosing so much space, had not a single
dormer window in it. The southern gable was turned towards the intruder,
and in it were two small windows at the top, crowded between the thick
chimney and the roof slope. The two main stories were well lighted,
however, and the porch was enclosed at the farther end, making a double
outside room there. No sheds, kitchens, or stables were attached to the
premises, but an old pole-well, like some catapult, reared its long pole
at half an angle between the crotch of another tree. Roads, marked by
tall worm fences, crossed at the level vista where this tall house
presided, and a quarter of a mile beyond the cross-roads, to the
northeast, was another house, much smaller, and hip-gabled, like
Twiford's, standing up a lane and surrounded by small stables, cribs,
orchard, and garden.
"I never 'spected to come yer," Jimmy Phoebus observed, "but I've
hearn tell of this place considabul. The big barn-roofed house is Joe
Johnston's tavern for the entertainment of Georgey nigger-traders that
comes to git his stolen goods. It's at the cross-roads, three miles from
Cannon's Ferry, whar the passengers from below crosses the Nanticoke fur
Easton and the north, an' the stages from Cambridge by the King's road
meets 'em yonder at the tavern. The tavern stands in Dorchester County,
with a tongue of Caroline reaching down in front of it, an' Delaware
state hardly twenty yards from the porch. Thar ain't a court-house
within twenty miles, nor a town in ten, except Crotcher's Ferry, whar
every Sunday mornin' the people goin' to church kin pick up a basketful
of ears, eyes, noses, fingers, an' hair bit off a-fightin' on Saturday
afternoon. They call the country around Crotcher's, Wire Neck, caze no
neck is left thar that kin be twisted off; the country in lower Car'line
they calls 'Puckem,' caze the crops is so puckered up. They say Joe's a
great man among his neighbors, an' kin go to the Legislater. The t'other
house out in the fields is Patty Cannon's own, whar she did all her
dev'lishness fur twenty years, till Joe got rich enough to build his
palace."
With the rapid execution of a man who only plans with his feet and
hands, the bay sailor observed that there was a grove of good high
timber--oaks and pines--only a few rods from the cross-roads and to the
right, under cover of which he could draw near the tavern. As he
proceeded to gain its shade, he heard extraordinary sounds of turbulence
from the front of the tavern, the yelling of men, the baying of hounds,
oaths and laughter, and, listening as he crossed the intervening space,
he fell into a ditch inadvertently, almost at the edge of the timber.
"Hallo!" cried Jimmy, lying quite still to draw his breath, since the
ditch was now perfectly dry, "this ditch seems to me to pint right for
that tavern."
He therefore crawled along its dry bed till it crossed under a road by a
wooden culvert or little bridge of a few planks.
The noise at the tavern was now like a fight, and, as Phoebus
continued to crawl forward, he heard twenty voices, crying,
"Gouge him, Owen Daw!" "Hit him agin, Cyrus James!" "Chaw him right up!"
"Give' em room, boys!"
Having crawled to what he judged the nearest point of concealed
approach, Phoebus lost the moment to take a single glance only, and,
drawing his old slouched hat down on his face to hide the bandaging, he
muttered, "Now's jess my time," and crept up to the back of the crowd,
which was all facing inwards in a circle, and did not perceive him.
A fully grown man, as it seemed, was having a fight with a boy hardly
fifteen years old; but the boy was the more reckless and courageous of
the two, while the man, with three times the boy's strength, lacked the
stomach or confidence to avail himself of it; and, having had the boy
down, was now being turned by the latter, amid shouts of "Three to two
on Owen Daw!" "Bite his nose off, Owen Daw!" "Five to two that Cyrus
James gits gouged by Owen Daw!"
The boy with a Celtic face and supple body was full of zeal to merit
favor and inflict injury, and, as the circle of vagrants and outlaws of
all ages reeled and swayed to and fro, Phoebus, unobserved by anybody,
put his head down among the rest and searched the faces for those of
Levin Dennis or Joe Johnson.
Neither was there, and the only face which arrested his attention was a
woman's, standing in the door of the enclosed space at the end of the
porch, at right angles to the central door of the tavern, and just
beside it. The whole building was without paint, and weather-stained,
but the room on the porch was manifestly newer, as if it had been an
afterthought, and its two windows revealed some of the crude appendages
of a liquor bar, as a fire somewhere within flashed up and lighted it.
By this fire the woman's face was also revealed, and she was so much
interested in the fight that she turned all parts of her countenance
into the firelight, slapping her hands together, laughing like a man,
dropping her oaths at the right places, and crying:
"I bet my money on little Owen Daw! Cy James ain't no good, by God!
Yer's whiskey a-plenty for Owen Daw if he gouges him. Give it to him,
Owen Daw! Shame on ye, Cy James!"
There was occasional servility and deference to this woman from members
of the crowd, however they were absorbed in the fight. She was what is
called a "chunky" woman, short and thick, with a rosy skin, low but
pleasing forehead, coal-black hair, a rolling way of swaying and moving
herself, a pair of large black eyes, at once daring, furtive, and
familiar, and a large neck and large breast, uniting the bull-dog and
the dam, cruelty and full womanhood.
Behind this woman, whom Phoebus thought to be Patty Cannon herself,
the moonlight from the rear came through the door in the older and main
building, shining quite through the house, and Phoebus saw that the
rear door was also open and was unguarded.
He took the first chance, therefore, of dodging around the corner of the
bar, intending to pass around the north gable of the house and dart up
the stairs by the unwatched door; but he had barely got out of sight
when a loud hurrah burst from the crowd as a feeble voice was heard