The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
certain illumination in spite of the loud storm.
"It's Bill Greenley. He's set de jail afire," the negro exclaimed. "See
me, O see me!"
The conflagration gave a vapory red light to a secluded dwelling they
now approached, upon a bowery lawn, and Sorden saw a woman of a severe
aspect looking out of a window at the fire.
"What is the meaning of this trespass so late at night?" she called.
"Are you robbers? My aged husband is asleep."
"Madam," answered Sorden, "here is the husband of Mrs. Patty Cannon. She
was your brother's mother-in-law. I love this man as I never loved A
male. He is wounded, and we want him taken in till he can have a
doctor."
"Take him to the jail, then, if that is not it burning yonder," the
woman exclaimed, scornfully. "Shall I make the home of the Chancellor of
Delaware a hospital for Patty Cannon's men as a reward for her sending
my brother to the gallows?"
She closed the window and the blind, and left them alone in the storm.
"Drive, Derrick, to your den at Cooper's Corners, quick, then," Sorden
said.
As they left the lane a flash of lightning, so near, so white, that they
seemed to be within the volume and crater of it, enveloped the wagon.
One horse sank down on his haunches, and the other reared back and tore
from his harness, while the wagon was overset.
The negro picked up his helpless fellow-African and lifted him on his
back, starting off in mingled avarice and terror, and saying,
"Derrick's gwyn home, sho'. See me, see me!"
Van Dorn put his finger at his throat, where blood was all the while
trickling, and, with a gentle cough, extorted the sounds:
"Leave me--under a bush--to--die."
"No," cried Sorden, raising Van Dorn also upon his back; "I love him as
I never loved A male."
The fire of the burning jail lighted their return into the outskirts of
Dover and to the gallows' hill, where stood the scaffold, split with the
lightning from cross-beam to the death-trap. As they halted opposite it
to rest, a horse and rider came stumbling past, and Molleston, dropping
his burden, shouted:
"Bill Greenley, dat's our hoss. We want it."
"His is the hoss that's on him," cried the escaped horse-thief, looking
scornfully up at his own gallows as he lashed his blinded animal along
in the rain.
"Cheer up, Captain Van," John Sorden said, soaked through with the rain;
"'t'ain't fur now to Cooper's Corners."
CHAPTER XXXVI.
TWO WHIGS.
"Goy! Look at the trees, friend Custis," said John M. Clayton, standing
before his office as the rising sun innocently struck the tree-tops in
the public square of Dover.
Judge Custis, sitting at an upper window, observed that many noble elms
and locusts had been riven by lightning, or torn by wind and wind-driven
floods of rain.
"What a night!" Custis exclaimed; "the jail burned, the lightning
appalling, and I thought I heard firearms, too."
Judge Custis heard Clayton say, as he entered the room:
"So ole Derrick Molleston, Aunt Braner, asked you about my dinner, did
he? And it's Bill Greenley that burned the jail? Goy! And the black
people licked the kidnappers at Cowgill House?"
"Dat dey did, praise de Lord!" ejaculated Aunt Braner, fervently.
Clayton turned to a young man at the table, now dressed in a good clean
suit of clothes, and said, as the old cook left the room:
"Now, friend Dennis, tell your tale. Goy!"
The boy, whom the Judge was startled to recognize, at once began:
"Jedge Custis, the kidnapper man you left in the kitchen has stole Aunt
Hominy and your little niggers. They was at Johnson's Cross-roads last
night. Maybe they's gone before this. My boat was hired to take 'em off,
and I had to come along, but I run away from the band and give warnin'
last night to Mr. Clayton yer."
Before the Judge could reply, Clayton exclaimed,
"Now, Brother Custis, permit me now! Let my noble old constituent and
fellow-Whig, Jonathan Hunn, resume!"
"Friend," spoke out a wiry, lean, healthy-skinned man, "this young man
surprised me last night with intelligence that thy Maryland friends were
marching on the very capital of Delaware, to steal men. I was out in the
road at that late hour for another Christian purpose, and the Lord
rewarded me with this good one: I brought friend Dennis to John
Clayton's back door, and he lent us all his firearms. At the little
brick grocery of William Parke, just beyond the Cowgill House--where I
am told he sells ardent liquors to negroes contrary to law, and so takes
the name among them of 'Kind Parke'--I found several of our free
Delaware negroes, I fear on no good errand. So I remarked, 'If William
Parke, contrary to law, has been selling thee brandy out of an eggshell,
as if he knew not the contents, I shall pay him to repeat the vile
enticement quickly, for ye who are of the world must fight this night.'"
"Goy!" said Clayton, warming up; "Quakers will set other people on,
won't they? Goy!"
"Other gunpowder arms were there procured, and we barricaded Cowgill
House so as to make it at once a decoy and a hornet's nest. I despise
war and men of war so much that I have somewhat studied their campaigns,
and I suggested, friend Clayton, that the stairway was a good tactical
defensive position--is that the vain term?--to send a volley out the
main door, and a flank fire on every door and window on the sides of
Cowgill's hall. It also commanded the back yard by a window on the
staircase. A door beneath the staircase was barricaded. There was a
festival, or feast, given that night, by absent friend Cowgill's
permission, by these Dover folks of color. I would not wonder if it was
designed or discovered by these scoundrels on thy line of states, friend
Custis. I told the men-at-arms to leave their huzzies all below in the
feasting-hall till the attack began, and then to let them escape up the
stairway, and to defend that stair like sinful men. But first a negro
spy knocked on the door, and a loop was thrown over his neck, and two of
the black boys gagged him. Then the attack was made, and, at my order,
all the lights were put out."
"Oh, Jedge," Levin Dennis broke in, "it was short and dreadful! Captain
Van Dorn had got to the bottom of the stairs, when the niggers half-way
up fired over his head and shot mos' everything down. The Quaker man yer
then pinioned the captain an' dropped him, wounded, out of the high
window. I pity Van Dorn, but _he_ says that he's in a bad business. I
hope he ain't dead."
"Who is this Van Dorn?" asked Judge Custis. "I've heard of such a
dare-devil, but he has never pestered Princess Anne."
"I ran and hid in the deep eaves of the garret story," Levin continued,
"which is built in like closets, and the wasps there, coming in to suck
the blossoms on the vines that has growed up through the eaves from
outside, flew around in the dark among the yaller gals that was a-hidin'
and a-prayin', and never feelin' the wasps sting em', thinkin' about
them kidnappers. I reckon, gen'lemen, the kidnappers will never come to
Dover no more."
"Two things surprise me," Clayton said; "that Joe Johnson would venture
to raid Dover itself after the licking I got him; and that free darkeys
could make such a defence."
"Ah! John Clayton," spoke Jonathan Hunn, "there was a white witness
there, to affirm that they only defended their lives."
"It was Captain Van Dorn that raided Dover," Levin spoke; "Joe Johnson
is a coward."
"Judge Custis," said Mr. Clayton, "you and I can save this peninsula, at
least, from the sectional excitements that are coming. You must
surrender to Delaware old Patty Cannon and her household. She now lives
on your side of the line. Come over to the Governor's office with me,
and I will get a requisition for her on the business of last night.
Young Dennis here knows the band; friend Hunn saw the attack."
Judge Custis's face grew suddenly troubled.
"Clayton," he said, "I would rather not appear in this matter. Indeed,
you must excuse me."
"What!" said Clayton; "hesitate to do a little thing like this, after
the free opinions you have expressed?"
There was a long, awkward pause. The Quaker arose, and, looking well at
Judge Custis, said:
"None but Almighty God knows the secrets of a slave-holder's mind. No
son of Adam is fit to be absolute over any human creature."
"Amen!" Judge Custis said, meekly.
* * * * *
The news from Princess Anne confirmed the loss of Vesta Custis's slaves.
Judge Custis was told to come home and take steps for their recovery,
but he was strangely apathetic. The day after the raid Levin Dennis
disappeared, Clayton only saying:
"Who would have thought that soft-eyed boy was already fascinated by
these kidnappers? He has taken his horse and gone back to Patty
Cannon's."
The suit against the Canal Company required a great deal of research, as
law-books were then scarce, and precedents for breaches of contract
against corporations were not many; this form of legal life being
comparatively modern in that day, like the dawn of the floral age, or
before megatheriums grazed above the trees or iguanodons swam in the
canals. Clayton and Custis walked and ate and lay down together,
comparing knowledge and suggestions, and the litigious mind of John
Randel, Junior, was rather irritating to both of them, so that, to be
rid of his society in Dover, the two lawyers, meantime supplied with
money by Meshach Milburn's draft, resolved to visit the canal, which was
distant about thirty miles.
The three men started together in a carriage, after breakfast, on a soft
yet frosty morning, such as often gives to this region a winter sparkle
and mildness like the Florida climate. They passed several tidal creeks,
as the Duck and the Little Duck, the Blackbird and the Apoquinimink,
and, as they advanced, the barns became larger, the hedges more tasteful
and trimmed like those in the French Netherlands, the leafless peach
orchards stretched out like the tea-plants in China. Two or three little
towns studded the roadside, the woods gave way altogether to smaller
farms, and, at a steep bottom called the Fiddler's Bridge, they turned
across the fields to an old four-chimneyed, galleried mansion, at the
end of a long lane, and near a great stagnant pond, where John Randel,
Junior, as he fully named himself on every occasion, had a fine dinner
spread.
After dinner they launched upon the stream in a row and sail boat, to
Mr. Clayton's trepidation, and bore out through acres of splutter-docks,
and muskrats and terrapins unnumbered, and many wild-fowl, to the
Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, which extended for several miles through
a mighty pond or feeder, like a ditch within a bayou.
The negro rower tied their boat behind a passing vessel, which towed
them out to the locks at the Delaware River, at a point opposite a
willowy island, and where an embryo "city" had been started in the
marshes, and there they waited for the packet from Philadelphia. Mr.
Randel took his negro man, a person of sorrowful yet inexpressive
countenance, to be a kind of piano or model on which to play his fierce
gestures.
"Clayton," said he, sitting on a stone lock in the evening gloaming, "I
ought to have been a lawyer. Not that I am not the greatest theoretical
engineer in the country, but my legal genius interposes, and I sue the
villains who employ me."
Here he gave the melancholy negro a violent shaking, who took it as
stolidly as a bottle of medicine shaken by the doctor.
"Yes, you sued Judge Ben Wright and he nonsuited you."
"I tell you a new axiom, Clayton," the earnest engineer cried, putting
the negro down on his hams and sitting on him; "whoever employs genius
has to be a scoundrel. In the nature of their relations it is so. He