The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
had him. He's a sea-crab playin' the setter fur niggers. He sang beef to
me in Princess Anne. I told him thar he'd pass for a nigger, Patty, and
we'll sell him fur one to Georgey!"
"All's fish that comes to our net, Joe," the woman chuckled; "he'll sell
high, too."
"That white man," spoke the voice of Samson, within the pen, his chains
rattling, "has hunderds of friends a-lookin' fur him, an' you'll ketch
it if you don't let him off."
"What latitat chants there?" Joe Johnson demanded of Patty Cannon.
"That's my nigger, Joe," the woman answered.
"Fetch him to the light."
The captain propped Samson up, and Joe Johnson glared into his face, and
then struck him down with the handle of his heavy whip.
"Patty," he growled, "that nigger's scienced; he's the champion scrapper
of Somerset. He knocked me down, and I marked him fur it; and now, by
God! I'm a-goin' to burn him alive on Twiford's island."
He swore an oath, half blasphemous, half blackguard, and the captain
murmured, with a lisp:
"The white man is the only _witness_. Make sure of him!"
Irons were produced, and the captain speedily fastened Phoebus's hands
in a clevis, and hobbled his feet, and placed him, without brutality, in
the pen, and, further, chained him there to a ring in the joist below.
As the door was closed and bolted, a voice from the darkness of the pen
cried out:
"Aunt Patty, let me out: I saved the captain's life; I took the white
man's knife. I'll serve you faithfully if you only let me go."
"He blowed the gab," said Joe Johnson, "but it won't serve him."
"Zeke," cried the woman, "it's no use. You go to Georgey with the next
gang--you an' the white nigger thar."
The man threw himself upon the floor and moaned and prayed, as the
lamplight disappeared and the hatchway slid echoingly over the stairs,
and the lower bolts were drawn. As he lay there in horror and amid
contempt, a voice arrested his ears near by, singing, with musical and
easy spirit, so low that it seemed a hymn, from the roads and fields far
down beneath:
"Deep-en de woun' dy hands have made
In dis weak, helpless soul."
The man listened with awe and silence, as if a spirit hummed the tune,
and forgot his doom of slavery a moment in the deeper anguish of a
treacherous heart that simple hymn bestirred. It was only Jimmy
Phoebus, thinking what he could say to punish this double traitor
most, who had turned his back upon his race and upon gratitude, and
Jimmy had remembered the poor woman chained to the tree on Twiford's
island, and her oft-reiterated hymn; and the conclusion was flashed upon
his mind that the mulatto wretch who decoyed her away and sold her was
none other than his renegade fellow-prisoner, in turn made merchandise
of because too dangerous to set at large in the probable hue-and-cry for
her.
"Poor Mary!" Phoebus slowly spoke, in his deepest tones, with solemn
cadence.
The wretched man listened and trembled.
"Mary's sperrit's callin' 'Zeke!'" Phoebus continued, awful in his
inflection.
The miserable procurer's heart stopped at the words, and his eyeballs
turned in torment.
"Come, Zeke! poor Mary's a-waitin' for ye!" cried the sailor, suddenly,
in a voice of thunder, and as suddenly relapsed into the low singing of
the quiet hymn again:
"Deep-en de woun' dy hands 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."
The elegant Iscariot, at the thunder of the invocation, had reached into
a place between two of the cypress shingles in the roof, where he had
hidden the sailor's knife, the blade being pressed out of sight, and
only the handle within his grasp. It had been overlooked in the exciting
scenes of the previous few minutes, and now recurred to his mind, as
superstitious passions rolled like dreadful meteors across the black and
hopeless chasm of his despairing soul.
When the low drone of the hymn he had heard his victim sing to her baby,
when her faith in him was pure and childlike, crossed his maddened ears
again, he raised one shriek of "Mercy!" to which no answer fell, and
drew the blade across his throat and fell dead in the kidnappers' den.
CHAPTER XXVI.
VAN DORN.
A thin fur of frost was on the level farm-lands, and the saffron and
orange leaves were falling almost audibly from the trees, as Levin
Dennis awoke on Wednesday, in the long, low house standing back in the
fields from Johnson's cross-roads, and drank in the cool, stimulating
morn, the sun already having made his first relay, and his postilion
horn was blowing from the old tavern that reared its form so broadly and
yet so steeply in plain sight.
Levin had been brought up from Twiford's wharf the night before by the
pretty maid whom Jimmy Phoebus had so much frightened, and this was
his first day of restful feeling, having slept off the liquor fumes of
Sunday, the exciting watches of Monday, and the mingled pleasure and
pain, illness and interest, love and remorse, of Tuesday.
He had felt already the earliest twinges of youthful fondness for the
young girl he had spent the day with at Twiford's, while lying sick
there from a disordered stomach and nervous system, and her amiability
and charms, more than the temptation of unhallowed money, had changed
his purpose to escape at Twiford's and give information of the injury
inflicted upon Judge Custis's property.
It hardly seemed real that he had been an accessory to a felony and a
witness to a murder--the stealing of a gentleman's domestic slaves and
the braining of the smallest and most helpless of them, nearly in his
sight; yet so it had happened, and he felt the danger he was in, but
hesitated how to act. He had accepted the money of the trader, and
passed his mother's noblest friend on the river without recognition,
while a dastardly ball had probably ended poor Phoebus's career. To
all these deeds he was the only white witness, the only one on whose
testimony redress could be meted out.
He felt, therefore, that he was a prisoner, and his life dependent on
his cordial relations with the bloody negro-dealer and his band; and
Johnson had reiterated his promise that if Levin joined them in equal
fraternity he should make money fast and become a plantation proprietor.
This night coming, a raid on free negroes in Delaware was to be made by
the band in force, and Levin had been told that he must be one of the
kidnappers, and his frank co-operation that night would forever relieve
him of any suspicions of defection and bad faith.
"Steal one nigger, Levin," Joe Johnson had said, "and then if ever
caught in the hock you never can snickle!"
Levin interpreted this thieves' language to mean that he must do a crime
to get the kidnappers' confidence.
The power of this band he had divined a little of when, at points along
the river, especially about Vienna, there had been mysterious
intercourse between Joe Johnson and people on the shore, carried on in
imitations of animal sounds; and the negro ferryman at that old
Dorchester village had spoken with Johnson only half an hour before the
trader's encounter with Jimmy Phoebus in mid-stream, whereupon the
grim passenger had produced his pistol and notified Levin:
"Now, my feller prig, honor's what I expect from you, and, to remind you
of it, Levin, I'm a-goin' to pint this barking-iron at your mummer, so
that if you patter a cackle, a blue plum will go right down your
throat."
He had then tried to evade some one expected on the river, and, in a fit
of rage at the awakening and wailing of the child, had hushed it
forever, and then had shot Phoebus down.
Poor Hominy had sincerely believed that Johnson's peculiar slang was the
language of the good Quakers, followers of Elias Hicks, who sheltered
runaway slaves and spoke a "thee" and "thou" and "verily," and that
strange misapprehension in her ignorant mind the keen dealer had made
use of to decoy her into Levin's vessel and waft her into a distant
country.
"We didn't steal her, Levin," Johnson said; "she wanted to mizzle from a
good master, an' we jess sells the crooked moke an' makes it squar."
When Aunt Hominy, having under her protecting care the little children,
came on board the _Ellenora Dennis_ at Manokin Landing, Levin had been
asleep, and knew nothing of the theft till it was too late to protest,
and Johnson himself had sailed the cat-boat into broad water. Then,
bearing through Kedge's Strait, he had cruised up the open bay, out of
sight of the Somerset shore, and entered the Nanticoke towards night by
way of Harper's Strait, and run up on the night flood; but the instinct
of Jimmy Phoebus had cut him off at the forks of the Nanticoke, and
propelled another crime to Johnson's old suspected record. He had never
been indicted yet for murder, though murder was thought to be none too
formidable a crime for him.
There was a zest of adventure in this guilty errand, which, but for its
crime, would have pleased Levin moderately well, the roving drop in his
blood expanding to this wild association; and he knew but little
comparatively of the Delaware kidnappers, reading nothing, and in those
days little was printed about Patty Cannon's band except in the distant
journals like _Niles's Register_ or _Lundy's Genius of Emancipation_.
Levin had never sailed up the Nanticoke region before, and its scenery
was agreeable to his sight, while his heart was just fluttering in the
first flight of sentiment towards the interesting creature he had so
unexpectedly and, as he thought, so strangely discovered there.
Arriving at Twiford's in the night, Johnson had sent him to bed there,
and pushed on himself with the negro property to Johnson's Cross-roads;
and, when he awakened late the next day, Levin had found a beautiful
wildflower of a young woman sitting by his pallet, looking into his
large soft eyes with her own long-lashed orbs of humid gray, and
brushing his dark auburn ringlets with her hand. As he had looked up
wonderingly, she had said to him:
"I have never seen a man before with his hair parted in the middle, but
I think I have dreamed of one."
"Who air you?" Levin asked.
"Me! Oh, I'm Hulda. I'm Patty Cannon's granddaughter."
"That wicked woman!" Levin exclaimed. "Oh, I can't believe that!"
"Nor can I sometimes, till the sinful truth comes to me from her own
bold lips. Oh, sir, I am not as wicked as she!"
"How kin you be wicked at all," Levin asked, "when you look so good? I
would trust your face in jail."
"Would you? How happy that makes me, to be trusted by some one! Nobody
seems to trust me here. My mother was never kind to me. Captain Van Dorn
is kind, but too kind; I shrink from him."
"Where is your mother now?"
"She has gone south with her husband, to live in Florida for all the
rest of her life, and we are all going there after father gets one more
drove of slaves. You are one of father's men, I suppose?"
"Who is your father?"
"Joe Johnson."
"That man," murmured Levin. "Oh, no, it is too horrible."
"Do not hate me. Be a little kind, if you do, for I have watched you
here hours, almost hoping you never might wake up, so beautiful and pure
you looked asleep."
"And you--that's the way you look, Huldy. How kin you look so an' be his
daughter."
"I am not his child, thank God! He is my stepfather."
"What is your name, then, besides Huldy?"
The girl blushed deeply and hesitated. Her fine gray eyes were turned
upon her beautiful bare feet, white as the river that flashed beneath
the window.
"Hulda Bruinton," she said, swallowing a sigh.
"Bruinton--where did I hear that name?" Levin asked; "some tale has been
told me, I reckon, about him?"