The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
"You can't mistake him, Dave. No shap is worn like that nowadays. Look
only fur his headpiece, and aim well!"
"Yes, Mars Joe."
"Fur me," continued the other voice, "I'll go right to the tavern an'
prove an _alibi_. My lay is to take the house gal that old Gripefist's
young wife thinks so much of. I'll snake her out to-night. She's the
property of Allan McLane, left him in his sister's will. They found on
her body the paper giving the gal to the dead woman only two days
before. She's Allan's to-morrow, but to-night she's mine!"
A sensual, sucking, chuckling sound, like a kiss made upon the back of
his own hand, followed this significant threat; and Mary, placing her
hand over the sinking slave girl's mouth, held her motionless.
"Tommy, Tommy! sing 'Roxy, Roxy, Roxy! Pore Jack! Pore Jack!' Sing,
Tommy, sing!"
"_There_," whispered the white man, softly, and was gone.
Mary breathed only the words to Virgie, "_Kidnappers_--come!" and they
glided from the old tenement unobserved, and entered the copse along the
stream.
"Pore Jack! Pore Jack! His leetle Roxy's gone away. Pore Jack! Roxy!
Roxy! Roxy!" the mourner at the window above chattered sleepily to the
nodding bird.
The negro at the corner of the old warehouse, half covered by the
willow's shade, peered up with blood-shotten eyes to distinguish the
covering on the bird-tamer's head.
He saw Jack Wonnell sitting backward on the window-frame, swaying in and
out, as he lazily tempted the mocking-bird to sing, and once the
bell-crown hat, so singular to view, came in full relief against the
gray sky.
"It's ole Meshach," said the negro, silently, with desperate eyes. "I
hoped it wasn't. Dar is de hat, sho!"
He cocked his huge horse-pistol, and took aim directly from below.
"Pore Jack! Pore Jack! I reckon Roxy won't have pore Jack, caze Tommy
won't sing. Sing, Tommy, little Roxy's pet: 'Pore Jack! Pore--'"
The great horse-pistol boomed on the night, and in the smoke the negro
rushed into the bush and sought the fields.
Down from his seat in the window-sill the witless villager came
backward, all bestrewn, measuring his body in the sand, where he lay,
silent as the other shadows, with his arms extended in the frenzy of
death, and his mouth wide open and flowing blood.
Jack Wonnell had paid the penalty of being out of fashion.
The mocking-bird, aroused by the loud report, leaped into the empty
window-sill to seek his tutor, and set up the lesson he had learned too
late:
"Poor Jack! Poor Jack! Roxy! Roxy! Roxy!" came screaming on the night,
and all was still.
* * * * *
William Tilghman was driving back from Whitehaven in the melancholy
thoughts inspired by the departure of his cousin, whom he had at last
seen go into the great wilderness of the world the passive companion of
her husband, like the wife of Cain, driven forth with him, when the
carriage was arrested at the ancient Presbyterian church--which
overlooked Princess Anne from the opposite bank of the little river--by
a woman almost throwing herself under the wheels.
"Why, Lord sakes! it's our Virgie!" cried Rhoda Holland.
The girl, with all the energy of dread, sprang into the carriage by
William Tilghman's side and threw her arms around him:
"Save me! Save me!"
"What ails you, Virgie?" cried the young man, assuringly. "You are in no
danger, child!"
"I am sold," the girl gasped, with terror on her tongue and in her wild
eyeballs. "Miss Vesty's sold me to her Uncle Allan. He's sent the
kidnappers after me. They're yonder, in Princess Anne. Oh, drive me to
the North, to the swamps, anywhere but there!"
"I know your mistress made you over to her mother, Virgie, for a
precaution, fearing you might not be safe in her own hands. She told me
so, and asked if the death of her mother could possibly affect you."
"Oh, it has!" the girl whispered. "Mary knows the kidnapper that's come
for me. He is the same that stole Hominy and the children. He kept her
chained on an island. He says he'll have me to-night, to do as he
pleases. Master McLane lets him have me!"
The girl, in her terror, as the carriage had descended the hill already
and crossed the Manokin, seized the reins in Tilghman's hands and drew
them with such frenzy that the horses, as they came to Meshach Milburn's
store, were pulled into the open area before it, where something in
their surprise or lying on the ground gave them immediate fright, and
they dashed at a gallop into Front Street, the wheels passing over an
object by the old storehouse that nearly upset the carriage.
The street they took for their run crossed a small arm of the Manokin,
and led up to a gentleman's gate; but before this brook was crossed
Tilghman, an experienced horseman and driver, had reined the flying
animals into a nearly unoccupied street, called Back Alley, parallel
with the main street of Princess Anne, but hidden from it by houses and
gardens, and almost in a moment of time the whole town had been cleared,
with hardly a person in it aware of such a vehicle going past.
It was a real runaway, but Tilghman, in a cool, gentle voice, like a
brook's music, told the girls to sit perfectly still, as they had a
clear, level road; and, seeing that he could not stop the animals by any
mere exercise of strength, without danger to his harness, he waited for
their power to wear out, or their fears to subside.
Rhoda Holland was ashamed to scream, if her pride was not too well
aroused already in the presence of the muscular young minister, sitting
there like an artillery teamster driving into battle, and his nostrils
and jaws delineated in the gray air, expressed almost the joy he had
long put by of following the hounds in the autumn fox-hunts, where Judge
Custis said he had been the perfect pattern of a rider.
As for Virgie, she felt no fear of wild horses, since they were leaving
behind the bloody hunters of men and women, and she almost wished it was
herself alone, dashing at that frightful pace to destruction, until the
young man, mindful, perhaps, of his mistress, torn from his sight to
inhabit another's arms, and feeling that this poor quadroon was dear as
a sister to Vesta's heart, bent down in the midst of his apprehensions
and kissed the slave girl pityingly.
Then, with an instant's greater torrent of tears, a sense of rest and
man's respect fell upon Virgie's soul, and she paid no heed to time or
dangers till the carriage came to a stop in the deep forest sands
several miles east of Princess Anne.
"William," said Rhoda Holland, "what air we to do to save Virgie? Uncle
Meshach's gone. Jedge Custis is nobody knows whar, now. This yer Allan
McLane, Aunt Vesty says, is dreffle snifflin' an' severe. I think it's a
conspliracy to steal Virgie when they's all away. Misc Somers would take
keer of her, but I'm afraid she'd tell somebody."
"Are you sure that you saw and heard truly?" the minister said to
Virgie.
"Oh, yes. I saw the same man at Mr. Milburn's the day he was taken sick.
He looked at me a low, familiar look, and muttered something evil. Mary
knew him too well. Oh, do not take me back to Princess Anne. I will
never go there again."
"It may be true," Tilghman reflected. "It probably _is_ true. Vesta has
no faith in Allan McLane. She says he makes money in the negro trade,
with all his religious formality. He is the trustee already of Mrs.
Custis's estate; no doubt, the administrator by will. He may have sent
Joe Johnson to kidnap Virgie, under color of his right, and Johnson
would abuse anybody. Vesta will never forgive us if we let Virgie go to
him."
"But I am a slave," Virgie sobbed. "Oh, my Lord! to think I am not Miss
Vesta's, but a strange man's, slave. How could she give me away!"
"It was an error of judgment," Tilghman replied. "She could not
anticipate her mother's immediate death. Yet there, where she thought
you safest, you were most in peril."
They had now crossed the Dividing creek into Worcester County, and
halted to cool the horses off at the same old spring, under the
gum-tree, where Meshach Milburn stopped, the evening he went to the
Furnace village.
"William," Rhoda Holland spoke, "if Virgie is McLane's slave you can't
keep him from a-takin' her. She can't go back to Prencess Anne at all."
"I don't mean that she shall, Rhoda. I know you are a brave woman, and
we will drive her to-night to Snow Hill, and leave her there with a
nurse, a free woman, once belonging to my family, and this nurse has a
husband who is said to be a conductor on what is called the Underground
Road to the free states."
"Lord sakes! a Abolitionist?"
"I hope so," Tilghman said. "I know Vesta wants to set this girl free,
and there is no way to do it, and respect her womanhood, but by giving
her a wild beast's chance to run."
"My, my! And you a minister of the Gospil, William!"
"Yes, of the Gospel that tells me how to be a neighbor to my neighbor."
The young man's eyes flashed. "I never felt so humiliated for my cloth
and for my country as now. To think how many men preach the Gospel of
God all their lives long, and have never set a living soul free. I will
do one such Christian felony, by the help of Christ."
As he spoke, the sound of a corn-stalk fiddle, and of foresters' naked
feet dancing on the floor of the old Milburn cabin, came crooning out in
the night.
In another hour they were at the Furnace village, its blast gone out,
its lines of huts deserted, no human soul to be seen; and the mill-pond,
lying like a parchment under the funereal cypress-trees, seemed stained
with the blood of the bog-ores that oozed upward from the depths like
the corpse of murdered Enterprise, suffocated in Meshach Milburn's
foreclosure.
A sense of desolation filled them all; but what was it, in either of the
white twain, to the bursting ties of that lovely quadroon, raised like a
lily in the household heat of kindness and the breath of purity, to be
cast forth like a witch, on a moment's information, and consigned to the
ponds and night-damps?
The horses toiled through the sand till an open country of farms gave
better roads, and at ten o'clock at night they crossed the Pocomoke at
Snow Hill, and stopped at a gate before a neat, whitewashed, one-story
house, with a large stack-chimney over the centre, and two doors and a
single window in the front. It stood in a short street leading to the
river, whose splutter-docks and reeds were seen near by among the masts
of vessels and the mounds of sawdust.
Virgie kissed Rhoda good-night, and descended with Mr. Tilghman, who
opened a gate, and, going up some steps, knocked at a vine-environed
door. A window opened and there was a parley, and the door soon
afterwards unclosed softly and admitted them.
"Oh, may God let you know some night the pure bed and sleep you have
brought me to!" Virgie whispered. "God bless you for the kiss you gave
me, my dear white playmate, that you are not ashamed of! Oh, my heart
is bursting: what can I say?"
"The people here will hide you, or slip you forward to-morrow night,"
the young minister said. "Here is money, Virgie, to pay your way. You
can write, and write to your young mistress wherever you go."
"Tell her," said the runaway girl, "that I loved her dearly. Oh, dear
old Teackle Hall! shall I ever see you again? William, I shall get my
freedom, or die on the road to it."
"That is the spirit," the minister said; "we will buy it for you if we
can, but get it for yourself if you can do it."
He kissed her again, with the instinct of a father to a child, and
hastened to his horses and the hotel.
As Tilghman and Rhoda, at the earliest dawn, started for Princess Anne,
the young girl suddenly turned and kissed her minister.