The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times
woman would only stamp her foot. There was that morning when your fire
would not burn, and a little black child bawled with the cold and
angered you; if its body is ever dug up where it was laid, the skull
cracked with the billet of wood will tell the tale. You once suspected
me of truantry from your charms--_Quedo, quedo!_ exacting dame--and the
pale offspring of poor Hagar you threw upon the blazing backlog, and
grimly watched it burn. The pursued children whose cries you could not
still, that yet are stilled till hell shall have a voice, not even you
can number. Evangelists, O Patty, dipping their pens in blood of saints
to write your crimes, would make the next age infidel, where you will
seem impossible, and all of us mythology!"
"Be still!" the woman cried, rising and walking, in her rolling gait, to
watch things without that stirred her mind more than her lover's
recitation; "what good kin these tales do you, Captain? My God! the
roads is full of people, and they are all looking yer. Is it at me, Van
Dorn?"
He coughed painfully, still watching her, however, and answered:
"Only a quarter-race, I guess, dear Pat! What! are you _fearing_, at
your time of life?"
"No," cried Patty Cannon, defiantly, taking something from her bosom;
"here is the same dose I gave my husband, if the worst comes."
"Bravo, Patty! you only tarnish into age, like an old bronze, that is
harder by time and oxidizing. I was a gentleman, and yet you mastered
me. How strange to see us together beleaguered here, myself by death,
and you by the law! Why, we have defied them both! Let them come on! Do
you believe in everlasting fire?--that every injury is a live coal to
roast the soul? I know you do; and, if you do, how beautiful your rosy
grate will be, tough charmer, with boys spoiled in the bud, and husbands
in the blossom, with families of freemen torn apart, and children, born
free as the flag of their country, sent to perpetual bondage and the
whip. _Poca barba, poca vergueenza!_[13] Who but a woman could have put
it into William Bouser's head, when she had kidnapped him and thirty
negroes more, and sold them all to Austin Woolfolk, in Baltimore, to
rise at sea on Woolfolk's vessel, and massacre the officers, only to be
hanged at last, and all to make Woolfolk a better customer!"[14]
"There are people all round the house, Van Dorn. I hear them on the
stairs and in the rooms. Have mercy!"
"Devils, or men, Patty? Both are your courtiers, remember, and perhaps
they crowd each other. What do we care? _Que contento estoy!_ Perhaps I
am indifferent because no blood is on my hands, vile slaver though I am!
Joe Johnson and his low-browed brother you could teach to kill; me,
nothing worse than to steal and fondle you. Patty, you believe in hell.
I am a believer, too; for I believe in heaven."
"O Van Dorn; how you do talk!"
"Since you entrapped my son, young Levin Dennis--_chito! quedito!_ do
not start, fair fiend--to have his father make another Johnson of him, I
have discovered, through the little girl, the beauteous damsel now,
Hulda Van Dorn, the sin you meant to spot me with; and, listen, Patty!
it was my son, rich with his mother's loyalty and love--dear guardian
wife, that never shall learn of my ruin here, nor see me more!--it was
my Levin, set free by me, who gave the news at Dover and beat us back."
He had partly risen as he spoke, and the exertion seemed to choke him.
The woman sat in dreadful silence, watching his veins rise upon his pale
and wilful face. He caught at his throat with his fingers, and for a
time could speak no more.
"Patty," said he, at last, between his coughing spells, "I believe
again, for I have seen my wife, true as an angel, beauteous as a child,
in prayer for me. An honest man waits my death to love her better, and
be the father of my son. _Hala o hala!_ I have had the daughter of my
murdered friend to kiss and bless me, and to love my son. My son has
given me his confidence, unknowing whom I was, and shown to me a brave,
pure heart. _Yo soy amado!_ Their prayers may knock for me at the
eternal door. But thou, the murderer of my youth, no heart will pray
for. Believe in hell, and die; _ha! hala! ho!_"
He pointed his white finger at her in an ecstasy, with a mocking smile
in his blue eyes, like fading stars at dawn, and then the rosy morning
flowed all round his mouth, as the bullet, detached in his emotion, fell
towards the lung, and wakened hemorrhage, and to the last of his
strength he pointed at her, and then fell back, in crimson linen,
smiling yet in death.
Terrified at the unwonted scene of a natural decease in that abode of
violence, the mistress only sat, the image of paralysis, till her door
slowly opened, and there entered, hand in hand, young Levin Dennis and
Hulda Van Dorn.
"Levin," the young girl said, composed as one to whom reputable life and
obsequies were familiar, "I have heard the dying sentences of this
misled, strong, disappointed man. Let us kneel down, dear friend, and
say a prayer. He was our father, Levin; not Van Dorn--_that_ is my name,
the daughter of his friend--but Captain Oden Dennis, of the _Ida_
privateer."
As they knelt, with closed eyes, the room slowly filled, and Patty
Cannon's arms were seized by two constables, and the warrant read to
her. She heard it with humility, making no answer but this:
"Once I had money an' friends a plenty; my money is gone, and so is my
friends; there's no fight now in pore ole Patty Cannon."
CHAPTER XLIV.
THE DEATH OF PATTY CANNON.
As Patty Cannon came out of the tavern the cross-roads were full of
people, taking their last look at the spot where she had triumphed for
nearly twenty years.
None thought to look at Van Dorn, nor ask what had become of him, and
his friend Sorden removed his body, unseen, to a spot in the pine woods,
where his unmarked grave was dug, and standing round it were three
mourners only, and Sorden said the final words with homely tears:
"I loved him as I never loved A male."
The Maryland constable marched Patty Cannon down to the little bridge of
planks where ran the ditch nearly on the State line, and tradition still
believes the figment that Joe Johnson at that moment was hiding beneath
it.
There, driven across the boundary like some borderer's cow, the queen of
the kidnappers was seized by the Delaware constable, and placed in a
small country gig-wagon, and, followed by a large mounted posse, the
road was taken to the little hamlet of Seaford, five miles distant.
She watched the small funereal cedars and monumental poplar-trees rise
strangled from the underbrush, the dark-brown streams flowing into inky
mill-ponds, the close, small pines, scarcely large enough to moan, but
trying to do so in a baby tone, and her eyes turned to the sand, where
she was soon to be. Not agony nor repentance nor any hope of escape
fluttered her cold heart, but only a feeling of being ungratefully
deserted by her friends, and ill-treated by her equals and neighbors,
who had so seldom warned or avoided her; no preacher had come to tell
her the naked gospel, and some had bowed to her respectfully, and even
begged her oats, and made subscriptions from her ill-gotten silver.
Seaford was a sandy place upon a bluff of the Nanticoke, and, as the
procession came in, a party of surveyors, working for Meshach Milburn's
railroad, paused to jeer the old kidnapper. She had grown suddenly old,
and never raised her voice, that had always been so forward, to make a
reply.
The magistrate, Dr. John Gibbons, had been an educated young Irishman
who landed from a ship at Lewes, and, marrying a lady in Maryland, near
Patty Cannon's, became the legal spirit of the little town. His office,
a mere cabin, on a corner by his house, being too small for the purpose,
the examination was adjourned to the tavern, at the foot of the hill,
near where a mill-pond brook dug its way to the Nanticoke. Around the
tavern some box-bush walks were made in the sand, and willow-trees
bordered the cold river-side, and, at pauses in the hearing, wild-fowl
were heard to play and pipe in the falling tide.
The evidence of Cy James and other cowardly companions in her sins was
quickly given, and the procession started through the woods and sands to
Georgetown, twelve miles to the eastward, where Patty Cannon was
received by all the town, waiting up for her, and the jail immediately
closed her in.
* * * * *
"I didn't ezackly make out what that cymlin-headed feller did it fur,"
Jimmy Phoebus remarked, in the hold of an old oyster pungy, where he
found himself with his mulatto friend and Aunt Hominy and the children,
"but the file he fetched me has done its work at last. Yer, Whatcoat,"
addressing his male fellow-prisoner, "take this knife the same feller
slipped me, an' cut these cords." Standing up free again, Mr. Phoebus
further remarked,
"Whatcoat, thar's two of us yer. By smoke! thar's three."
The docile colored man opened his eyes.
"Him!" exclaimed the sailor, indicating the feather-bed in the hold,
with its stiff, invisible contents; "Joe'll chuck him overboard down yer
about deep water somewhere. Now, for a little hokey-pokey; I think I'll
git in thar myself, an' let Joe sell t'other feller fur a nigger."
Phoebus's power over his fellow-prisoners--little children and idiotic
Hominy included--was now perfect, and he began to explore the rotten old
hold, which contained oyster-rakes, fish-lines, and the usual utensils
of a dredging-vessel, and soon discovered that there could be made a
clear passage to crawl through her from forecastle to-cabin by removing
a few boards.
"Yer, Hominy," he said, "get to work with your needle, old gal; I'm
goin' to take you home."
* * * * *
With a good start, and a fair wind and slack tide, Johnson was off
Vienna at eight o'clock.
"Ten mile to go, an' they can't catch me with a racehorse," he said,
"after I pass Chicacomico wharf, an' git abaft the marshes. I'm boozy
fur sleep. Thar's two in this crew I don't know, and I must be helmsman.
Bingavast! I'll make my nigger work his passage."
He walked to the hatchway over the hold, and, sliding it back, dropped
in, and, with a few expert blows of the professional smithy, set
Whatcoat free, merely glancing where Phoebus lay upon his face,
snoring hard.
"Cool cucumber of a bloke," Johnson said, "he'll be too much fur me in a
trade; I'll have to stifle him!" Then, ordering the mulatto man astern,
Johnson gave him the tiller, and sat near, nodding, till the second
wharf on the starboard was passed.
"Now Gabriel can't overhaul me," Johnson exclaimed; "thar's no more road
on the Dorchester side, an' the Somerset roads is all gashed by creeks
an' barred by farm-gates. I'll sink that dab an' stiffy."
He called two deck hands, and lifted the body out of the hold. Phoebus
still placidly slept upon his face, and Johnson looked at him with
peculiar envy after a hurried glance at the dead. Some ropes being put
around the bed, and drag-irons attached to them, the whole weight was
unceremoniously thrown overboard at the point of Hungry Neck, and the
dealer remarked, apologetically:
"There goes a great hypocrite, gentlemen; he wasn't above piracy, ef he
could git another man to fly the black flag for him. I reckon he'll be
'conservative' enough after this. And now I'll snooze. Steer her for
Ragged Point, yonder, Whatcoat, an' when you git thar wake me. It's
clear broad inlet all the way; an' remember, nigger, I sleep and shoot,
on hair triggers!"
With his pistols in his hand, Johnson lay down in the cabin a few feet
from the helmsman, and tried to see and sleep at once. He had been