The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
"Yes, everybody knows it," Hulda said, in a voice of pain; "he was
hanged for murder at Georgetown when I was a little child."
Levin could not speak for astonishment.
"I might as well tell you," she said, "for others will, if I conceal it.
I can hardly remember my father. My mother soon married Joe and
neglected me, and Aunt Patty, my grandmother, brought me up. She was
kind to me, but, oh, how cruel she can be to others!"
"You talk as if you kin read, Huldy," said Levin, wishing to change so
harsh a topic; "kin you?"
"Yes, I can read and write as well as if I had been to school. Some one
taught me the letters around the tavern--some of the negro-dealers: I
think it was Colonel McLane; and I had a gift for it, I think, because I
began to read very soon, and then Aunt Patty made me read books to
her--oh, such dreadful books!"
"What wair they, Huldy?"
"The lives of pirates and the trials of murderers--about Murrell's band
and the poisonings of Lucretia Chapman, the execution of Thistlewood,
and Captain Kidd's voyages; the last I read her was the story of Burke
and Hare, who smothered people to death in the Canongate of Edinburgh
last year to sell their bodies to the doctors."
"Must you read such things to her?"
"I think that is the only influence I have over her. Sometimes she looks
so horribly at me, and mutters such threats, that I fear she is going to
kill me, and so I hasten to get her favorite books and read to her the
dark crimes of desperate men and women, and she laughs and listens like
one hearing pleasant tales. My soul grows sick, but I see she is
fascinated, and I read on, trying to close my mind to the cruel
narrative."
"Huldy, air you a purty devil drawin' me outen my heart to ruin me?"
"No, no; oh, do not believe that! I suppose all men are cruel, and all I
ever knew were negro-traders, or I should believe you too gentle to live
by that brutal work. I looked at you lying in this bed, and pity and
love came over me to see you, so young and fair, entering upon this life
of treachery and sin."
Levin gazed at her intently, and then raised up and looked around him,
and peered down through the old dormers into the green yard, and the
floody river hastening by with such nobility.
"Air we watched?" he inquired.
"By none in this house. All the men are away, making ready for the hunt
to-morrow night. The river is watched, and you would not be let escape
very far, but in this house I am your jailer. Joe told me he would sell
me if I let you get away."
Levin listened and looked once more ardently and wonderingly at her, and
fell upon his knees at her uncovered feet.
"Then, Huldy, hear me, lady with such purty eyes,--I must believe in
'em, wicked as all you look at has been! I never stole anything in my
life, nor trampled on a worm if I could git out of his path,--so help me
my poor mother's prayers! Huldy, how shall I save myself from these
wicked men and the laws I never broke till Sunday? Oh, tell me what to
do!"
"Do anything but commit their crimes," she answered. "Promise me you
will never do that! Let us begin, and be the friends I wished we might
be, before I ever heard you speak. What is your name?"
"Levin--Levin Dennis. My father's lost to me, and mother, too."
"Then Heaven has answered my many prayers, Levin, to give me something
to cherish and protect. I am almost a woman: oh, what is my dreadful
doom?--to become a woman here among these wolves of men, who meet around
my stepfather's tavern to buy the blood and souls of people born free.
Joe Johnson sells everything; he has often threatened to sell me to some
trader whose bold and wicked eyes stared at me so coarsely, and I have
heard them talk of a price, as if I was the merchandise to be
transferred--I, in whose veins every drop of blood is a white woman's."?
"I want you to watch over me, Huldy: I'm a poor drunken boy, my boat
chartered to Joe Johnson fur a week an' paid fur. Tell me what to do,
an' I'll do it."
"First," she said, "you must eat something and drink milk--nothing
stronger. Their brandy, which they 'still themselves, sets people on
fire. I will set the table for you."
It was after the table had been set that Jimmy Phoebus slipped in and
devoured the milk and meat, overhearing the continuance of the
conversation just given; and when his awkward motions had disturbed
these new young friends, Hulda fainted on the stairs before the
apparition Levin did not see, and he snatched the kiss that was like
plucking a pale-red blossom from some dragon's garden.
That night two horses without saddles came to bring them both to
Johnson's Cross-roads, and Levin awoke at Patty Cannon's old residence
on the neighboring farm.
He looked out of the small window in the low roof Upon a little garden,
where a short, stout, powerfully made woman, barefooted, was taking up
some flowers from their beds to put them into boxes of earth.
"Yer, Huldy," exclaimed this woman, "sot 'em all under the glass kivers,
honey, so grandmother will have some flowers for her hat next winter.
They wouldn't know ole Patty down at Cannon's Ferry ef she didn't come
with flowers in her hat."
A mischievous blue-jay was in a large cherry-tree, apparently
domesticated there, and he occupied himself mimicking over the woman's
head the alternate cries of a little bird in terror and a hawk's scream
of victory.
"Shet up, you thief!" spoke the woman, looking up. "Them blue-jays, gal,
the niggers is afeard of, and kills 'em, as Ole Nick's eavesdroppers and
tale-carriers. That's why I keeps 'em round me. They's better than a
watch-dog to bark at strangers, and, caze they steals all their life, I
love' em. Blue-jay, by Ged! is ole Pat Cannon's bird."
"Grandma," Hulda said, "I wish you had a large, elegant garden. You love
flowers."
"Purty things I always _would_ have," exclaimed the bulldog-bodied
woman, with an oath; "bright things I loved when I was a gal, and traded
what I had away fur 'em. Direckly I got big, I traded ugly things fur
'em, like niggers. I'd give a shipload of niggers fur an apern full of
roses."
"Florida, they say, is beautiful, grandma, and flowers are everywhere
there."
"Yes, gal, they says so; but I don't never expect to go thar.
Margaretty, your mommy, likes it thar. Delaware's my home; some of 'em
hates me yer, and the darned lawyers tries to indict me, but I'll live
on the line till they shoves me over it, whar I've been cock of the walk
sence I was a gal."
As Hulda, also barefooted, but moulded like the flowers, so that her
feet seemed natural as the naked roots, carried the boxes around to the
glass beds encircling a chimney--dahlias, autumnal crocuses or saffrons,
tri-colored chrysanthemums or gold-flowers, and the orange-colored
marigolds--the elder woman, resting on her hoe, smelled the turpentine
of a row of tall sunflowers and twisted one off and put it in her
wide-brimmed Leghorn hat.
"When I hornpipe it on the tight rope," Levin heard her chuckle, "one of
these yer big flowers must die with me."
She disappeared into the peach orchard, which tinted the garden with its
pinkish boughs, and Levin improved the chance to look over the cottage
and the landscape.
It was a mere farm, level as a floor, part of a larger clearing in the
primeval woods, where only fire or age had preyed since man was come;
and, although there seemed more land than belonged to this property, no
other house could Levin see over all the prospect except the bold and
tarnished form of Johnson's castle, sliding its long porch forward at
the base of that tall, blank, inexpressive roof which seemed suspended
like the drab curtain of a theatre between the solemn chimney towers;
the northern chimney broad and huge, and bottomed on an arch; the
southern chimney leaner, but erect as a perpetual sentry on the King's
road.
The house where Levin Dennis now looked out was a three-roomed, frame,
double cabin, with beds in every room but the kitchen, and the hip-roof
gave considerable bed accommodation in the attic besides, the rooms
being all small, as was general in that day. Around the house extended a
pretty garden, with some cherry and plum trees and wild peach along its
boundaries, and the fields around contained many stumps, showing that
the clearing had been made not many years before, while here and there
some heaps of brush had been allowed to accumulate instead of being
burned.
As Levin looked at one of those brush-heaps in a low place, a pair of
buzzards slowly and clumsily circled up from it, and, flying low, went
round and round as if they might be rearing their young there and hated
to go far; and, for long afterwards, Levin saw them hovering high above
the spot in parental mindfulness.
He drew his head in the dormer casement, and was making ready to go down
to the breakfast he smelled cooking below, when his own name was
pronounced in the garden, and he stopped and listened.
"You lie!" exclaimed the old woman's voice. "I'll mash you to the
ground!"
"He said so, grandma, indeed he did."
Levin had a peep from the depths of the garret, and he saw that Mrs.
Cannon was standing with the hoe she had been using raised over Hulda's
head, while a demoniac expression of rage distorted her not unpleasing
features.
Levin walked at once to the window and whistled, as if to the bird in
the tree. The older woman immediately dropped her hoe, and cried out to
Levin:
"Heigh, son! ain't you most a-starved fur yer breakfast? It's all ready
fur ye, an' Huldy's waitin' fur ye to come down."
Levin at once went down the short, winding stairs to a table spread in
the kitchen end, and the old woman blew a tin horn towards Johnson's
Cross-roads, as if summoning other boarders, and then she said to Levin,
with a very pleasing countenance:
"Son, these yer no-count people will be askin' you questions to bother
you, and I don't want no harm to come to you, Levin; so you tell
everybody you see yer that Levin Cannon is your name, and they'll think
you's juss one o' my people, and won't ask you no more."
Hulda slightly raised her eyes, which Levin took to mean assent, and he
said:
"Cannon's good enough for a body pore as me."
"You're a-goin' with Joe to-night, ain't you?"
"Yes'm, I b'leeves so."
"That's right, cousin. You'll git rich an' keep your chariot, yit.
Captain Van Dorn's gwyn to head the party. As Levin Cannon, ole Patty's
pore cousin, he'll look out fur you, son. Now have some o' my slappers,
an' jowl with eggs, an' the best coffee from Cannon's Ferry. Huldy, gal,
help yer Cousin Levin! He won't be your sweetheart ef you don't feed him
good."
The breakfast was brought in by a white man with a face scratched and
bitten, and one eye full of congested blood.
"Cy," Patty Cannon cried, "them slappers, I 'spect, you had hard work to
turn with that red eye Owen Daw give you."
"I'll brown both sides of him yit, when I git the griddle ready for
him," the man exclaimed, half snivelling.
"Before you raise gizzard enough for that, little Owen'll peck outen yer
eyes, Cy, like a crow; he's game enough to tackle the gallows. You may
git even with him thar, Cy."
The man turned his cowardly, serving countenance on Levin inquisitively,
and looked sullen and ashamed at Hulda, who observed:
"Cyrus, you are not fit for the rude boys around father's tavern, who
always impose on you. Please don't go there again."
"Where else kin he go?" inquired Patty Cannon, severely; "thar ain't no
church left nigh yer, sence Chapel Branch went to rot for want of
parsons' pay. Let him go to the tavern and learn to fight like a man,
an' if the boys licks him, let him kill some of 'em. Then Joe and the
Captain kin make somethin' of Cy James, an' people around yer'll respect