"What Comforter?" sighed Virgie, and there seemed a great blank, and then she heard a scream—was it she that screamed so?—and she was trying with all her might to get somewhere, and was fainting in the labor, but trying again and again, and then a calmness that was like gentle awe, strange because so painless, spread into her nature, and she only listened.

"My daughter," said a voice, "my own child! Call me 'father,' and say I am forgiven."

"Father! forgiven!" she murmured, and felt a warm face, that yet could not warm her own, shedding tears and kissing her, and close to it her arms were thrown tight, as if she never could let go, and everything was music, but wonderful.

She feared she must fall if she did not hold to him. Who was it that called her "daughter"? Why came those cold stars so close, as if to spy upon him?

Oh, holy purity, that held so fast and did not know, but trusted nature's quivering embrace! She wrestled with something, like a rock of ice, to move her eyes and see, or ere she was dashed down forever, the eyes that gushed for her. They were her master's.

"Master," she said, "whose am I?"

"Mine before God. Pure to my heart as your white sister, Vesta! White as young love, in fondness and trust forever!"

"And mother?" gurgled the girl's low notes; "where is she?"

"Yonder," said the Judge, "in Heaven, that will judge me, whither she winged in bearing thee to me!"

A happy light came over Virgie's face. She kissed her father twice, as if the second kiss was meant for her happier sister, and, raising her arms towards the sky he pointed to, whispered, "Freedom!" and died upon his breast.



CHAPTER XL.

HULDA BELEAGUERED.

Owen Daw brought the news of the repulse from Cowgill House and the wounding of Captain Van Dorn.

"Where is the little tacker, Levin?" asked Patty Cannon, furiously.

"Arrested, I 'spect," cried O'Day, boldly; "Van Dorn's hit in the throat."

"He'll not talk much, then," muttered the woman; "his time had to come. Where will I find another lover at my age? Why, honey," she chuckled to herself, in a looking-glass, "that son of his'n may come back. He's took a shine to Huldy: why not to me?"

At the idea another hideous thought came to her mind: to settle Hulda's fate in her young lover's absence, and monopolize the corrupting power over Levin Dennis, if he ever lived to see Johnson's Cross-roads again.

As individual fugitives returned, confirming the decisive repulse of the band, Patty Cannon's face grew dark, and her oaths low and deep; Cyrus James heard her say:

"If I could only hang some one for this! Joe Johnson's the white-livered sneak that would not go. I've hanged a better son-in-law."

"Aunt Patty, I love your grandchild, Huldy," Cy James ventured to say. "The Captain's wounded and Joe's going away to Floridy. Maybe I kin git you up another band."

Without an instant's consideration of this ambitious proposition, Mrs. Cannon threw Cy James, by main strength, through the window of her bar, into her kitchen, and he bawled like a baby, yet came out of his grief muttering, "Ploughin', ploughin'! I'll make her into batter and fry her yet."

With this reflection Mr. James hid himself for the remainder of the afternoon in some secluded part of the Hotel Johnson.

Mrs. Cannon, however, had instantly resumed her monologue on business.

"They all think to give the old woman the go-by: a sick man's no good, and there's that wife of Van Dorn's hopin' to git him yit. By God! she sha'n't have him in his shroud. No; I'll recruit from young material. Ruin 'em when they's boys, and, while you kin pet 'em, they'll do your work! I have one nigger in the garret Joe wants to burn: he's my nigger, and I'll let him loose to bring me more niggers. Money is what I need to put on a bold front: Huldy must fetch it!"

With this resolution Patty Cannon mounted the stairs to a room on the second floor, and, without knocking, pushed her way in.

A man of a voluptuous form and face, like one overfed, yet on the best, and with stiff, military shoulders, and of colors warm in tint, yet cold in expression, blue eyes, and rich, wine-lined cheeks and lips, that still seemed hard and self-indulged, spoke up at once:

"Always knock, Patty! it's more conservative. My way in life is to reach my point, but respect all the forms. What do you want?"

"When do you leave for Baltimore, Cunnil McLane?"

"As soon as Joe returns with my dear sister's property: to-morrow, I hope."

"You can take Huldy Bruington if you pay my price for her: two thousand dollars down. If you won't give it, she shall be married to some young kidnapper, who will fetch twice that pile for her in niggers. They'll all fight their weight in black wildcats to git her."

"Very, very abrupt proposition, Patty; not conservative at all. What's the matter with you, dame, to-day. Van Dorn not lucky, heigh?"

He gave her a vitreous smile and watched her over his round paunch, on which a crystal watch-seal hung, like a more human eye than his own. Her color began to rise.

"I'm mad," said Patty Cannon; "don't worry me; don't Jew me! Do you mind? Yes, Van Dorn has been whipped—by niggers, too. Will you pay my price or not?"

"Tut, tut, good woman! What can I want with a white girl. It wouldn't look conservative at all in Baltimore."

Patty Cannon stamped her foot.

"Don't rouse me with any of your hypocritical cant, Cunnil McLane! What have you been teachin' that child to read an' write fur—out of your Bible, too? What do you bring her presents fur, and hang around us when we know you despise us all, except fur the black folks we can sell you cheap? Haven't I been sold to men like you time and again before I was a woman, and don't I know the sneaking pains that old men take to look benevolent when youth an' beauty is fur sale; and how they pet it to keep it pure fur their own selfish enjoyment? God knows I do!"

"Patty, you shock me!" the rubicund gentleman observed. "I have always found you conservative before. Now, go and send sweet Hulda here, and, for Heaven's sake, Patty, don't reveal this bargain to her."

"Is it a bargain, Cunnil?"

"It is, if she can be made willing to it."

"That she shall, or make her bed in the forest, where good looks are not safe around yer."

Hulda was found at a window, looking out upon her former home, and at a ploughman who had nearly completed the furrows in a large field, sparing only some low places piled with brush, over one of which some buzzards circled, lofty, yet intent as anglers watching their tackle. Hard as that home had been to Hulda, she regretted leaving it for this men's tavern, where her grandmother's saucy temperament found so many incentives to bravado, and her caution, that had to be exercised in Delaware, was quite unnecessary on the Maryland side of the line.

At the little hip-roofed white cottage Hulda had felt a sense of privacy pleasing to her growing life, and her ability to read often charmed Patty Cannon to a stillness that was like the hyena's sleep, and even made her acquiescent and cordial.

But where she met men alone, unmodified by modest women's example, the bold tendency of Patty was to out-do men, and lead them on to audacities they would have feared to follow in but for her courage and policy; for she could coax either young or coarse natures, as well as she could drive.

These feats of strength and cunning, statecraft and desperation, reminded Hulda of a book she had read about the Norman knights in England kidnapping and robbing the poor Saxons; and one description of King William the Conqueror suggested to Hulda that he was perhaps a Patty Cannon in his times, as his body and legs were short and powerful, like hers, and he could bend a bow riding on horseback that no other knight could bend on foot with the legs planted firmly. He could not read nor write, and was superstitious, yet cruel as the grave. All this was true of Patty Cannon, whose feat of standing in a bushel measure and putting three hundred pounds of grain on her shoulder has been related.

She often wrestled and bound, without assistance, strong black men fighting for their liberties. She could ride horseback, sitting like men, in a way to make Joan of Arc seem a maid of mere tinsel.

Hulda was dressed in her best clothes, her hair was tied in wide braids, her fine features and large, tender, yet seeking, gray eyes, never had been turned on Patty Cannon so directly.

Her grandmother abandoned in a moment an attempt to be complaisant, and sternly ordered her to attend to Colonel McLane's chamber.

"I can support you no longer, huzzy," said the dark-eyed woman, her cheeks full of blood. "Make haste to find some easy life or Joe shall get you a husband. We are ruined. You must make money, do you hear!"

"Here is money, grandma!" said Hulda, producing some of the shillings of 1815.

At the first glance of these Patty Cannon turned pale, but, in an instant, the hot blood rushed to her face again, and she swore a dreadful oath and chased Hulda, with uplifted hands, into the chamber of Allan McLane.

"Ah, Hulda, inflaming your poor grandmother again!" said that carefully clad and game-fed gentleman. "Now, now, lovely girl, it's not conservative. Honor thy father and mother, and grandmother, of course; didn't I teach you that?"

"What is it to be conservative?" Hulda asked, sitting before the fire, while the Colonel ran over her straight feet and tall, willowy figure, and stopped, a little chilled by her clear, dewy eyes.

"Conservative? why, it's never to rush on anything; to oppose rushing; to—to be a bulwark against innovations. To prefer something you have tried, and know."

"Like you?" asked Hulda.

"Yes, your benefactor, instead of having some impulsive passion. Of course, you never loved in this place?"

"It is the only place I know. To be conservative, as you call it, I must take my life and opportunity as I find them, like something I have tried and know."

"Ah, Hulda! I see you have a radical, perverse something in you, to twist my meaning so close. You do not belong to this vile spot, except by consanguinity. It would be perfectly conservative for you to look to a better settlement."

"You have hinted that before," Hulda said, serene in his presence as a young woman used to proposals. "I do want to change this life, but I cannot do it and be conservative. I must fasten upon a free impulse, a natural chance of some kind. God has kept my heart pure in this dreadful place, where I was born. Why are you here, if you are conservative? It is not a gentleman's resort."

He grew a little angry at this thrust, but she continued to look at him quietly, unaware that she was impertinent.

"I often have business, Hulda, with Joe and Patty; negroes are very high, and we must buy them where they are to be had. But a deepening religious interest in you often attracts me here."

"Why religious as well as conservative, sir?"

"I have been afraid that the sights you see here, after the good instructions I have given you, might make you an infidel."

"What is an infidel?"

"One who, being unable to explain certain evils in life, refuses to believe anything. That is the case with Van Dorn, a very bad man. Stepfather Joe is always conservative on that subject. Deviate as much as he may, he never disbelieves. Aunt Patty, too, erratic as she is, holds a conservative position on a Great First Cause."

Here McLane drew out his gold spectacles, and turned the leaves of his Bible over, and pointed Hulda a place to read, beginning, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." At his command she read it, with faith, yet observation, her mind being fully alert to the warning Van Dorn had left her, that in his absence her great trial was to be.

McLane was wearing a gray English suit, with full round paunch, sleek all over the body, his hair a little gray, his gold glasses dangling in his hand, patent varnished slippers and silk stockings, and a silk scarf and cameo pin in it, and a cameo of his deceased sister upon his finger-ring, marking his attire; his eyes, of a pop kind, much too far forward, and blue as old china, and yet an animal, not a spiritual blue—the tint of washing-blue, not of distance; a hare-lip somewhere in his talk, though the fulness of his very red lips hardly allowed place for it; and his nose and brows stern and military, as if he had been a pudding stamped with the die of a Roman emperor or General Jackson.

He watched her reading with censorship, yet desire, patronage, and oiliness together.

Glancing up when she had read far enough, Hulda thought he was looking at her as if she was some rarer kind of negress.

"Beautifully read, Hulda! I never go to such places as theatres, but you might be, I should say, an actress. Don't think of it, however! Very unconservative profession! I take great pride in you, my lovely girl; suppose I take you home with me!"

He walked to her stool, and laid his warm hand on her neck, standing behind her; she did not move nor change color.

"Something has happened to me, Colonel McLane," Hulda spoke, clear as a bell out of a prison, "to make even Johnson's Cross Roads good and happy. Can you guess what it is?"

She bent her head back, and looked up fearlessly at him, as if he were the negro now.

"Not religious ecstasy?" he said. "Not camp-meeting or revival conversion, I hope. That's vile."

"No, Colonel. It is knowing a pure young man, whose love for me is natural and unselfish."

"Great God!" spoke McLane, removing his hand. "Not some kidnapper?"

"No," Hulda said, "no slave-dealer of any kind. They cannot make him so. He is perfectly conservative, Colonel, as to that vileness. I believe he is a gentleman, too."

"You must have great experience in that article," he sneered, looking angry at her.

"I have seen you and my lover; you have the best clothes, and profess more. He has a nature that your opportunities would bring real refinement from. He respects me, wretched as I am; I read it in his eyes. You are looking for a way to degrade me in my own feelings, yet to deceive me. Can you be a gentleman?"

She was serene as if she had said nothing, though she rose up, and stood at one side of the fireplace, opposite him; between them was a print of General Jackson riding over the British.

In that moment Allan McLane felt that the girl was cheap at her grandmother's figure.

He had always conceived her a flexible, peculiar child; in a few minutes she had grown years, and become a rare and nearly stately woman, not now to be moulded, but to be tempted with large, worldly propositions.

"May I ask who this lover is that I am so much beneath, Hulda—I, who have taught you the accomplishments you chastise me with? I found you sand; I made you crystal."

He drew out a large pongee handkerchief, and really dropped some tears into it. She continued, cool and unmoved:

"My love is Levin Dennis, from Princess Anne. I am not afraid to tell it."

"Why?"

"Because I want his danger and mine to be fully known to him, and make him a man."

The Colonel folded his pongee, and came again to Hulda's side.

"That dissipated boy! Oh, Hulda, where is your real pride? He has abandoned his mother. He is a poor gypsy. No, I must save you from such a mistake. It is my duty to do it."

"I thank you for teaching me, whatever made you do it. If I could awaken in you some unselfishness towards me and my new love, sir, it would be the greatest gratitude I could show you. You conceal so many hard, bad things under your word 'conservative,' that the gentle feelings, like forgiveness, have forsaken you, I fear."

"No," the Colonel said, stiffly, his shoulders becoming more military, "insults to my honor I never forgive. People who do not resent, have no conservative principle."

"I forgive, as I hope to be forgiven, Joe, Aunt Patty, Van Dorn, and you. I hope pity and mercy and sweet, unselfish love, such as I think mine is, may grow in all of you! Oh, Colonel,"—she turned to him earnestly, and, raising her hands to impress him, he merely noted the elegance of her wrists and brown arms—"the buying and selling of these human beings makes everybody unfeeling. It is stealing their souls and bodies, whether they be bought at the court-house or kidnapped on the roads. My dream of joy is to have a husband who will work with his own free hands, and till his little farm, and sail his vessel, without a slave. Above that I expect and ask nothing from the dear God who has so long been my protector in this den of crime."

"Warm or cold, hectoring or tender, you are splendid, Hulda," McLane said, his face fairly refulgent. "Now let me show you a conservative picture of your real deserts. I am a bachelor. I keep an elegant house in Baltimore. My table is supplied with the best in the market; my servants are my slaves, and never disobey me; my paintings are celebrated; books I never run to—they are radical things—but I can buy them; my carriage is the best Rahway turn-out, and my horses are Diomeds. In Frederick County I have an estate, in sight of the mountains. As a Christian act, I will take you away from this spot, to which you seem but half kindred, and make you my wife."

"You ask me to marry you?"

"Conservatively; that is, continue to be my pupil, and obey me. I will bring your mind out of its ignorance, your body out of rags, your associations out of crime. I will provide for you, as you are obedient, while I live and after I am dead. You shall travel with me, and see bright cities—New Orleans, Charleston, Havana. If you remain here, you will be another Patty Cannon or go to jail. There! Look at it conservatively: warmth, riches, pleasure, attention, change, dress to become you, a watch and jewels, against villainy and lowness of every kind."

"How are you to be repaid for this?"

"By your love."

"But it is not mine to give; Levin has it."

"Pooh! that's beneath you."

"But it is gone; I cannot get it back; it will not come."

"Give me yourself," McLane said, drawing her towards him; "the refinements I do not care about. Be mine!"

The girl allowed herself to be brought nearly to his side, and, as he bent to kiss her with his large, complacent lips, she glided from his hands.

"I could never stoop," said Hulda, "to be even the wife of a negro dealer."

He colored to the eyes, yet with admiration of her almost aristocratic composure.

"You could not stoop to me?" he said "Not from your father's gallows?"

"No; he was a robber, but a bold one. You only receive the goods."

She was gone; and he stood, with evil lights in his face, but no shame. He drank some brandy from a flask, and murmured, "Now I have an insult to revenge, as well as a fancy to be gratified; her father must have been a cool rogue. Well, everything has to be done by force here; Patty Cannon shall see my gold."



CHAPTER XLI.

AUNT PATTY'S LAST TRICK.

Opposite McLane's room was the vestibule to the slave-pen in the garret, a room Van Dorn usually slept in. With her emotions profoundly excited, though she had not revealed them—her modesty having received a stab that now brought bitter tears to her eyes, and blushes, unseen except by the angels, whose white wings had hidden them from her tempter—Vesta fled into this room to deliberate upon her dire extremity.

Three persons only were now in the house, each one an interested party in her ruin; the man she had left, and Cy James, who was full of cowardly passion for her, and Patty Cannon, who, in her present frame of mind, would gloat to see Hulda's virtue sacrificed as something inconsequential and merry and heartless.

"Perhaps I can fly to our old house across the State Line, and take refuge with the new tenant there," Hulda thought. "Oh! I wish Van Dorn was here; he is so brave; and when he left me his kiss was like my father's."

Chains clanked, and the drone of low hymns came down the hatchway from the slave-pen.

"There is a white man up there," Hulda reflected; "dare I go up to see?"

She unlocked the padlock, and stepped up the ladder. At the pen door she peeped, but could not make out anything in the blackness. Then she pulled the peg out of the staple, and walked into the sickly odor of the jail.

"How many are here?" Hulda asked. "I hear you, but cannot see."

"Three men, one old woman, and some little things, makes the present contents of Pangymonum," spoke up a rough, cheery voice, "an', by smoke! it's jess enough."

"Is it the white man that talks?"

"He says he's white, but they think it's goin' to be easy hokey-pokey to pass him off for a nigger."

Her eyes soon recognized the speaker as he said, "By smoke! miss, you're not much like a Johnson. I reckon you're Huldy."

"Yes, and you, sir?"

"I was Jimmy Phoebus before I was a nigger."

The girl went rapidly up to him, and put her arms around him.

"Thank God!" she said, "you are not dead. Levin Dennis, my dear friend, wept to think you were at the river bottom. But, quick, sir; I may be caught here. Are you all true to each other?"

"Yes, the traitor's cut his wizzen. Speak out, Huldy!"

"I heard Patty Cannon mutter that she was going to set her black man free to kidnap for her. Hark! I must fly."

Hulda descended the ladder in time to surprise Cy James coming up. He bent his goose neck down as he leaned his hands upon his knees, and, looking up into her face, ejaculated,

"Hokey-pokey! By smoke! And Pangymonum, too."

* * * * *

"Samson," said Jimmy Phoebus, as soon as Hulda disappeared, "git ready to be a first-class liar; I want you to take up Patty Cannon's offer."

"An' leave you yer alone, Jimmy? I can't do it."

"Don't be a fool, Samson. Ironed here, we can't help nobody. Make your way to Seaford and Georgetown, and go round the Cypress Swamp to Prencess Anne. Alarm the pungy captains; fur Johnson'll try to run us by sail, I reckon, down the bay to Norfolk. I've got a file that cymlin-headed feller give me, an' I reckon I'll git out of my irons about the time you git to Judge Custis's. There! ole Patty's coming."

"Go, Samson," spoke the Delaware colored man. "I'm younger than you, and I'll fight as heartily under Mr. Phoebus's orders."

Aunt Hominy's voice came in blank monologue out of the background:

"He tuk dat debbil's hat, chillen, an' measured us in wid little Vessy."

* * * * *

That evening there was a long, free conference between Samson and Patty Cannon, in her kitchen, next to the bar, where Hulda heard laughing and invitations to drink, and all the sounds of perfect equality, the negro's piquant sayings and bonhommie seeming to disarm and please the designing woman, whose familiarity was at once her influence and her weakness, and she lavished her sociable nature on blacks and whites. Samson was so fearless and observing that he betrayed no interest in escaping, and came slowly into the range of her temperament; but, as Hulda peeped, towards midnight, into the kitchen, she saw old Samson kindly patting juba, while Patty was executing a drunken dance.

As the latter dropped upon a pallet bed she had there, and fell into a doze, the colored man quietly raised the latch and walked off the tavern porch.

* * * * *

In the morning dawn horses and voices were heard by Hulda, and she recognized Joe Johnson's steps in the house. He shook Patty Cannon, but could not awaken her; then looked into Van Dorn's room, and found Hulda, apparently sound asleep, and heard his name called by Allan McLane across the hall:

"Joe! not so loud. Be conservative. Come in; I'm waiting for you. Is all done and fetched?"

"The bloke with the steeple felt will never snickle," spoke the ruffian.

"Good, good, Joe! Vengeance is mine, and it's a conservative saying. My dear sister is at peace."

"The two yaller pullets have slipped you; the abigail mizzled to the funeral with your niece, and t'other dell must have smelt us, and hopped the twig."

"Not tasteful language at all, Joe. I don't understand you. Where are the two bright wenches, Virgie and Roxy?"

"Roxie's in Baltimore; Virgie's run away."

"Run? Where? Don't trifle with me, Joe Johnson! Conservative as I am, I don't like it, sir. Where could she have run?"

"There's no way for her to slip us but by water or through the Cypress Swamp, Colonel. She ain't safe this side of Cantwell's bridge. Word has gone out, and every road is watched."

"But Van Dorn is beaten back; he hasn't made a single capture; the niggers drove him out of Dover with firearms, and he is wounded somewhere."

The tall kidnapper turned pale, and then consigned Van Dorn's shade to eternal torment.

"Don't swear before me, sir!" McLane, also irritated, exclaimed. "It's not conservative, and I won't permit it. How do I know Meshach Milburn is dead? who did it?"

"Black Dave fired the barker, and saw him settled."

"Send him here!"

The negro came in, red-eyed, and hoarse with diseased lungs, and stood, the wreck of a once gigantic and regular man.

"Gi' me a drink," he muttered; "I'm mos' dead wi' misery an cold."

"Tell this man what you did," Joe Johnson spoke; "you waited till you saw the hat at the window, and fired, and fetched hat an' man to the ground?"

Swallowing a thimbleful of McLane's brandy, the negro grunted "Blood!" and looked tremblingly at his hands.

"What shape of hat was it?" McLane asked, shaking the negro savagely; "was it like this?" shaping his own soft slouched hat to a point.

Black Dave looked, and shook his head.

"Not like that? Damnation!"

"No swearing, Colonel, before us conservatives," ventured Joe Johnson; "what was the hat like, Dave? You're drunk."

"Like dis, I reckon." He modelled the crown into a bell form with his finger.

Joe Johnson and McLane looked at each other a minute with mutual accusation and confusion, and the former unceremoniously knocked the negro down with his great fist.

"No gold of mine for this job, Joe Johnson," said Allan McLane; "in your conservatism to save your own skin, you have let your tool kill an innocent man."

He waved his hand, with all his strong will, towards the door, and shut it in the kidnapper's face. Then, in haughty emotion, not like fear, but disappointed pride and revenge, McLane sat down, glanced around him as if to determine the next movement, and instinctively reached his hand towards his Bible, which he opened at a marked page, and softly read, till tears of baffled vindictiveness and counterfeited humility stopped his voice, as follows:

"'To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up ... God requireth that which is past ... man hath no pre-eminence above a beast, for all is vanity.... a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?'"

When tears of pious vindictiveness had closed the reading, Colonel McLane spread his pongee handkerchief on the bare floor, and knelt in silent and comfortably assured prayer.

* * * * *

Black Dave had crawled into the room where Hulda partly heard these revelations, and he entered the large closet under the concealed shaft to the prison pen, where his groans and mental agony touched Hulda's commiseration. She opened the trap, and crawled there too.

"Hush, Dave!" she whispered. "What makes you so miserable?"

"Missy, I'se killed a man. Dey made me do it. I'll burn in torment. Lord save me!"

"Dave," said Hulda, "my poor father died for his offences. You can do no more; but, like him, you can repent."

"Oh, missy, I's black. Rum an' fightin' has ruined me. Dar's no way to do better. De law won't let me bear witness agin de people dat set me on. How kin I repent unless I confess my sin? De law won't let me confess."

"Confess your poor, wracked soul to me, Dave. The Lord will hear you, though you dare not turn your face to him."

"Missy, once I was in de Lord's walk. My han's was clean, my face clar, my stummick unburnt by liquor. I stood in no man's way; at de church dey put me fo'ward. My soul was happy. One day I licked a man bigger dan me. It made me proud an' sassy. I backslid, an' wan't no good to be hired out to steady people; so de taverns got me, an' den de kidnappers used me, an' now de blood of Cain an' Abel is on my forehead forever."

Hulda knelt by the murderer, and prayed with all her heart; not the self-conscious, special pleading of the prayer across the hall, but the humble prayer of the penitent on Calvary: "Lord, we, of this felon den, ask to be with thee in Paradise."

* * * * *

The whole of the next day was spent in preparations for flight by Patty and her son-in-law.

A boat of sufficient size, and crew to man it, had to be procured down the river, and this necessitated two journeys, one of Patty, to Cannon's Ferry, another by Joe, to Vienna and Twiford's wharf.

During their absence Cy James was equally intent on something, and Hulda saw him in the ploughed field near the old Delaware cottage, under the swooping buzzards, directing the farmer where to guide his plough, and it seemed, in a little while, that one of the horses had fallen into a pit there.

Later on Hulda observed Cy James, with a spade, digging at various places near Patty Cannon's former cottage.

"All are at work for themselves," Hulda thought, "except Levin and me. How often have I seen Aunt Patty slip to secret places in the night, or by early dawn, when she looked every window over to see if she was watched. Her beehives were her greatest care."

A sudden thought made Hulda stand still, and cast the color from her cheeks.

"They are all going away. I shall be taken, too, or kept for worse evil here. My mother, in Florida, hates me; she has told me so. I know the marriage Allan McLane means for me—to be his white slave! Levin is poor, and his mother is poor, too; they say Patty Cannon has buried gold. Perhaps God will point it out to me."

She slipped down the Seaford road, and walked up the lane in the fields she knew so well. No person was in the hip-roofed cottage. Hulda went among the outbuildings, and began to inspect the beehives, made of sections of round trees, and the big wooden flower-pots Patty Cannon had left behind her.

She was only interrupted by a gun being fired in the ploughed field, and saw the pertinacious buzzards there fall dead from the air as they exasperated the ploughman.

* * * * *

"I shall have one piece of fun in Maryland before I go," Hulda heard her stepfather say, as he went past her bed to ascend the hatchway at morn, "and that is to burn the nigger who mugged me. This is his day."

Almost immediately he came, cursing, down the ladder, followed by a jeering laugh from above, and the cry, "We'll all see you hanged yit, by smoke! an' mash another egg on your countenance, nigger-buyer!"

In a moment or two a tremendous quarrel was going on below stairs between the kidnapper and his wife's mother, and Hulda believed they were murdering each other; and, peeping once to see, beheld Johnson holding Patty to the floor, and stuffing her elegant hair, which had been torn out in the scuffle, into her mouth.

"I'll be the death of you, old fence, before I go," he shouted; "the verdict would be, 'I did the county a service.'"

"Come away there!" cried Allan McLane, pushing past Hulda and between the combatants. "Shame on you, Joe! To whip your grandmother is hardly conservative. Here is an errand that will pay you well: my wench Virgie has been caught."

The kidnapper released the woman and turned to his guest.

"Good news!" he said; "ef it puts my neck in the string, I'll fetch her fur you."

His countenance had begun to assume a sensual expression, when Patty Cannon, to whom his back was turned, rushed upon him like a tornado, lifted him from his feet, and threw him through the back door into the yard and bolted him out. McLane retreated by the other door.

"Thank heaven!" reflected Hulda, looking down in terror, "no one is murdered yet, and I have another day of grace to wait for Levin."

* * * * *

"Cunnil McLane," said Patty Cannon, in his room that night, "what interest have you in the quadroon gal an' Huldy, too? You don't want' em both, Cunnil?"

"No, Aunt Patty. All my views are conservative. Quite so! Hulda I want to reform and model to my needs. She'll ornament me. By taking the girl Virgie from my niece Vesta, I desire to punish the latter for consenting to the degradation of our family, and marrying the forester, Milburn. She loves this quadroon; therefore, I want to deprive her of the girl: Joe is to bring her to me, do you see?"

His face expressed the indifference he felt to Virgie's safety on the way, and the coarse suggestion gave Patty Cannon her opportunity:

"Cunnil, there's but three in the house to-night; I am one."

"I am two, Patty."

"And three is purty Huldy, Cunnil!"

They looked at each other a few minutes in silence.

"There is two to one," said Patty Cannon, with a giggle. "We have no neighbors that air not used to noises yer."

The silence was restored while the two products of men-dealing read each other's countenances.

"I made a very conservative and liberal proposition to her, Patty, and she insulted me, yet beautifully. But I owe her a grudge for it."

"Insulted you, Cunnil? The ongrateful huzzy! Can't you insult her back? She never dared to disobey me. Her pride once broke down, she'll be like other gals, I reckon."

"That's true, no doubt. But, Patty, haven't you a little remorse about it, considering she's your grandchild?"

"My mother had none fur me, honey," the old woman chuckled, familiarly.

"What is that story I have heard something of, about your origin, Patty?"

"I don't know no more about it, Cunnil, than a pore, ignorant gal would, you know. I've hearn my grandfather was a lord. A gypsy woman enticed his son and he married her. His father drove him from his door, an' his wife fetched him on her money to Canady, where she went into the smugglin' business at St. John's, half-way between Montreal and the United States."

"And he was hanged there for assassinating a friend who detected him?"

"They says so, honey. Anyhow, he was hanged. We gals was beautiful. Says mother: 'It's a hard world, but don't let it beat you, gals! Marry ef you kin. Anyway, you must live, and you can't live off of women.' I married a Delaware man, and so I quit bein' Martha Hanley and became Patty Cannon."[7]

"And what a career you have led, Aunt Patty! Lived anywhere but in this old pocket between the bays, you would have had the reputation of Captain Kidd. Tell me now, conservatively, was not your own helpless childhood the cause of your mistakes, and does it never make you feel for other sparrow-birds like Hulda?"

The black-haired woman, with a certain evil-thinking, like one reflected upon harshly, finally clapped her bold black eyes on McLane's, and replied, chuckling:

"I don't know as it do, Cunnil. Before my mother pinted the way, I loved the men. I loved 'em to be bad. Mommy tuk us as we drifted. An' as fur Huldy yer, her mother throws her onto me; she's not like the Cannons an' Johnsons; she's full of pride, and," with an oath, "let it be tuk out of her! Will you pay my price?"

He hesitated.

"It's not the price, Patty; it's the way. Isn't it cowardly?"

"Yes," said Patty, saucily, "it's kidnappin'. That's the trade yer. Pay down the money, Cunnil, an' this bare room will brighten to be your wedding chamber. Pah! are you a man!"

Her words aroused the visions self-love can reluctantly repulse, and which, entertained but an instant, grow irresistible.

The limber, maturing, rounding form of Hulda stepped on the footstool of his mind, touched his knee, and exhaled the aroma of her youth like a subtile musk, till he leaned back languidly, as if he smoked a pipe and on its bowl her bust was painted, and all her modesties dissolved into the intoxication. Brutality itself grew natural to this vision, as a fiercer joy and substitute for the deceit he could no longer practice. The child had flown from her in the instant of his grasping it, like a pale butterfly, but there remained where it had floated, a silken and nubile essence, fairy and humanity in one, clad in pure thoughts and sweet respect, the profanation of which would be as rare a game as Satan's struggle with the soul of Eve.

Her innocence and spirit, self-respect and awakened womanly consciousness, weakness and sensibility, mettle and beauty, presented themselves by turns; and the cold, woodeny room, the neglected tavern, the autumn night wind coming down the chimney and starting the fire, all seemed instinctive, like him, with mischief, as if Patty Cannon's soul flew astraddle of a broom and led a hundred witches.

McLane was fifty; his family was a stiff commercial one, that had generally kept demure, yet grasping, and practised the conservatism he also boasted of, but had departed from: he was the outlaw of the house, yet elevating its tenets into an aggressive shibboleth, the more so that he prospered by anti-progress.

He was a backer of domestic slave-dealers, and put his money into forms of gain men hesitated at; not only at the curbstone, for usury, but behind pawnbrokers and sporting men, in lottery companies and liquor-houses, and, it was said, in the open slave-trade, too, clippers for which occasionally stole out of the Chesapeake on affected trading errands to the East Indies, and came home with nothing but West India fruits.

He strove to maintain his credit by ostentatious abhorrence of novelties and heterodoxies, and of all liberal agitations, and had the sublime hardihood to carry his Bible into every sink of shame, as if it was the natural baggage of a gentleman, and expected with him; and he would rebuke "blasphemy" while bidding at the slave auction or sitting in a bar-room full of kidnappers, among many of whom he passed for a religious standard.

No portion of that Bible gave him any delight or occupation, however, except the Old Testament, with its thoroughgoing codes of servitude, concubinage, and an-eye-for-an-eye. He knew the Jewish laws better than the Scribes and Pharisees in the time of Herod and John, and had persuaded himself that the mental endorsement and, wherever possible, the practice of these, constituted a firm believer. Revenge, intolerance, formality, and self-sleekness had become so much his theory that he did not know himself whether he was capable of doing evil provided he wanted anything.

Not particularly courageous, he was so destitute of sensibility that he felt no fear anywhere; and, generally going among his low white inferiors, he was in the habit of being looked up to, and rather preferred their society. On everything he had an opinion, and permitted no stranger in Baltimore to entertain any. The riot spirit, so early and so frequent in that town, reposed upon such vulturous and self-conscious social pests as he, ever claiming to be the public tone of Maryland.

"Patty," said Allan McLane, in his hare-lip and bland, yet hard, voice, like mush eaten with a bowie-knife, "I may pay you this money and you may fail to deliver the property. Will she be tractable?"

"Cunnil, I'll scare her most to death. She'll hide from me yer by your fire, and my voice outside the door will keep her in yer till day."

McLane went to his portmanteau and unlocked it, and took out rolls of notes and a buckskin bag of gold.

The yellow lustre seemed to flash in Patty Cannon's rich black eyes, like the moon overhead upon a well.

"How beautiful it do shine, Cunnil!" she said. "Nothing is like it fur a friend. Youth an' beauty has to go together to be strong, but, by God! gold kin go it alone."

He counted out two piles, one of notes and one of gold, using his gold spectacles upon his hawk nose to do so, and said:

"Patty, I've bought many a grandchild with the old woman, but this is the first child I have bought from the grandmother. Now fulfil your contract and earn your money!"

He put his spectacles in his pocket, stretched his gaitered slippers before the fire, looked at his watch and let the crystal seal drop on his sleek abdomen, and his vitreous, blue-green eyes filled with color like twin vases in a druggist's window. He was ready and anxious to substitute the ruffian for the tempter.

Patty Cannon, glancing at the money on the table, and bearing a lamp, started at once through the house, calling "Huldy! Huldy!"

Nothing responded to the name.

She searched from room to room, peering everywhere, and made the circuit twice, and, taking a lantern, went into the windy night and round the bounds of the old tavern.

The house was easily explored, having no cellar nor outbuildings, and the trap to the slave-pen was locked fast. The girl's shawl and hat were also gone.

"She's heard us, I reckon," the old woman muttered; "she's run away an' ruined me. Joe's cruel to me; Van Dorn is gone; without gold I go to the poor-house. McLane is pitiless—"

She dwelt upon the sentence, and, with only an instant's hesitation, turned into the tavern again and buttoned the outer door.

Beneath her feather bed she reached her hand and drew out a large object, took a horn from the mantel and sprinkled it with something contained there, and then, in a bold, masculine walk, stamping hard went in the dark up the open stairs again, talking, as she advanced, loudly, complaisantly, or sternly, as if to some truant she was coaxing or forcing. Finally, at McLane's chamber, she knocked hard, crying:

"Open, Cunnil! Here's the bashful creatur! She daren't disobey no mo'. Step out and kiss her, Cunnil!"

"Ha!" said McLane, throwing open his door, out of which the full light of fire and candles gleamed, "conservative, is she? Well, let her enter!"

As he made one step to penetrate the darkness with his dazzled eyes, Patty Cannon silently thrust against his heart a huge horse-pistol and pulled the trigger: a flash of fire from the sharp flint against the fresh powder in the pan lit up the hall an instant, and the heavy body of the guest fell backward before his chair, and over him leaned the woman a moment, still as death, with the heavy pistol clubbed, ready to strike if he should stir.

He did not move, but only bled at the large lips, ghastly and unprotesting, and the cold blue eyes looked as natural as life.

Patty Cannon took the chair and counted the money.



CHAPTER XLII.

BEAKS.

The wind was blowing in spells, like crowds moved during an argument, at one time mute as awe, again murmurous, and sometimes mutinous and fierce, when Hulda, having heard a few words only of her grandmother's overture, glided from the old tavern and passed on into the night, terrified but not unthinking, till she reached some large pines that seemed to say over her head, high up towards heaven: "Where now, oh where, oh-h-h wh-h-here, in the co-o-o-old, co-o-o-old w-h-h-h-ilderness of the wh-h-h-orld?"

"Anywhere!" answered Hulda, not afraid of cold or nature, so intense had become her fear of men and women. "Still, where? I might go to Cannon's Ferry and tell my tale to those hard-hearted merchants, or to Seaford and beg a shelter somewhere there; but first I will try our old cottage home again."

She went so quietly up the field lane that dogs could not have heard her, and, as she approached the little house, saw lights in it, and soon heard voices and saw moving figures within.

Knowing every knot-hole and crack of the little dwelling, Hulda soon had a perfect view of the contents of the house by standing in the dark, a little distance from one of the low, small windows.

A table stood in the middle of the main room, on which was an old mouldered chest with the earth clinging to it, and beside the chest were bones and shreds of clothing on the riven lid of the chest.

"You swear that the evidence you give shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God!" exclaimed a small, chunky, Irish-looking person, presenting a book to be kissed by a scrawny, chinless, goose-necked lad, whom Hulda immediately recognized as Cyrus James.

"Shall I take him, Doctor Gibbons?" asked a fine-looking, easy-mannered man, of the magistrate.

"Yes, Mr. Clayton."

"Do you know the nature of an oath? What is it?"

"I'll be fried like a slapper on the devil's griddle ef I don't tell right," whined Cy James, zealously.

"No you won't; at least, not first. If you don't tell me the truth I'll have your two ears cut off on the pillory, and no slapper shall enter that hungry stomach of yours for a month. Goy!"

He looked at Cy James as if he had a mind to bite his nose off as a mere beginning.

"Now, Hollyday Hicks, you and Billy Hooper and the other constables take away this box, which smells too loud here, as soon as the witness has sworn to it. When did you last see this box, James?"

"About ten year ago, sir, when I had been bound to Patty Cannon four year, I reckon, I see Patty an' Joe Johnson an' Ebenezer, his brother, all toting this chist to the field an' a-buryin' of it."[8]

"What did you see them put in that chest?"

"A dead man—a nigger-trader. I can't tell whether his name was Bell or Miller; she killed two men nigh that time, an' I was so little that I've got 'em mixed."

"Did you see her kill this man?"

"No, sir, I wasn't home. I got home in time to see 'em packin' him in the box. I hearn Patty tell the boys how she killed him. Oh! she was proud of it, sir, becaze she didn't have no help in it."

Half a dozen heads of constables, some of whom Hulda knew, leaned forward together to hear the witness, while others removed the unsavory remains. Mr. Clayton continued:

"How did she say she killed him?"

"She said he come to Joe's tavern with a borreyed hoss from East New Market, where he told the people he was buyin' niggers, and would take fifteen thousand dollars wuth if he could git 'em. He was follered out, an' Ebenezer Johnson got in ahead of him. They told him the tavern was full, an' he would be better tuk care of at a good woman's little farm close by. They made him think, she said, that a gentleman with much money wasn't allus safe at the tavern. Aunt Patty got him supper. He sit at the table after it a-pickin' of his teeth. She got her pistol an' went out in her garden a-hoein' of her flowers. Once she come up on him at the window to shoot, but he turned quick, an' she says to him: 'Oh, sir, I only want to see if you didn't need somethin' more.' 'No, no,' says he; 'I've made a rale good supper.' 'I loves my flowers,' Aunt Patty says, 'an' likes to hoe 'em at sundown, so they can sleep nice an' soft.' 'Do you?' says he; 'I reckon you're a kind woman.' He turned around agin an' begin to look over his pocket-book. She hoed an' hoed, an' hummed a little tune. All at once she slipped up, an' I heerd her say, 'Boys, I give it to him good, right in the back of the head, an' he fell on to the table, an' the water he had been drinkin' was red as currant wine.'"

"James Moore, I'll swear you next," the magistrate said to the new tenant of the farm; and this man proceeded to testify concerning the finding of the chest as he was ploughing in a wet spot where he had removed some brush.

Cy James, being recalled, gave testimony as to other buried bodies, chiefly of children slaughtered in wantonness or jealousy, or to avoid pursuit.

"Take this boy, Joe Neal," said Constable Hicks,[9] "and hold him fast."

"Goy!" said Clayton, with a terrible frown at Cy James, "we may have to hang him yet! Guilty knowledge of these crimes for so many years, and exposure at last only for a private resentment, constitute an accessory. Well for you, depraved young man, if you had possessed the principle of this young gentleman!"

The Senator placed his hand upon a sitting figure, and there arose in Hulda's sight the image of her lover, Levin Dennis.

"Constables," said Dr. Gibbons, the magistrate, "I shall give you your warrants now. The Maryland authorities propose, without waiting for extradition proceedings, to deliver your prisoners at the state line."

"Goy!" said Clayton, "they may have friends in the executive chambers at Annapolis. No, boys, act together, like patriots, as the Maryland and Delaware lads served in the same revolutionary brigade. Joe Johnson is due here at noon to-morrow: be careful not to disturb old Patty nor awaken her suspicions till he arrives. She is almost past doing evil, but he has a lifetime left to do it in."

"Constable Neal, I'll shove them over the line to you!" spoke the Maryland officer.

"Constable Wilson, look out when you lay on to old Patty: she may be loaded and go off," exclaimed the Delaware officer.

"Doctor John Gibbons," spoke Clayton, "waste no time with them at the hearing in Seaford, but get horses and send them right to Georgetown jail; they are slippery as eels. Goy!"

As Cy James was being taken to a secure place in the garret he turned to Levin Dennis, much wilted and crestfallen.

"Oh, Levin," he said, "Huldy won't have me now, I know. Won't you stand by me, Levin? She's goin' to marry you, and I'll give ye all I've found."

"Huldy!" Levin exclaimed; "oh, must I leave her yonder at the tavern another night?"

"No," answered Hulda, coming forward; "we are both preserved, my friend. But I must have made my bed in the forest this night if God had not directed me to you."

As they clasped each other fondly, Senator Clayton exclaimed,

"What? Doves among the rattlesnakes. Goy!"



CHAPTER XLIII.

PLEASURE DRAINED.

The dawn had not broken when that fleet traveller, Joseph Johnson, anticipating his enemies by hours, noiselessly tied his horses at the tavern he had erected, and nearly fell into the arms of Owen Daw.

"Joe," said that scapegrace, "thar's queer people hanging around yer. They say a blue chist has been dug outen the field yonder, an' bones in it. I 'spect they're a-lookin' fur you, Joe."

"I'll give you a job, Owen," said Johnson, quick on his feet as the boy. "Run these horses into my wagon thar while I git some duds together before I hop the twig."

Slipping to the rear of the house, he entered, and looked in Patty's room—she was not there; a slight smell of gunpowder seemed to be in the hall. Passing rapidly up the stairs, Johnson saw a light shine in McLane's room, and he kicked the door wide open, exclaiming,

"Bad luck everywhere; the gal's stone dead; the beaks are round us. Wake up, McLane!"

"Joe!" said a voice, and Patty Cannon threw her arms around him.

"To burning fire with you!" bellowed the filial son. "Take your arms away!"

"Let us make up, Joe! Everybody has run away from us. Huldy is gone, too. McLane is dead."

"Dead? Dead where?"

"There"—she pointed to a feather-bed lying upon the floor, the outlines of which seemed unusually pointed and stiff for feathers, though it was sown up in its own blankets and quilts. Joe Johnson touched it with his foot and bounded back.

"Hell-cat!" he cried, "is this one of your tricks?"

"I did it fur you, Josie. He brought it on hisself. There's his portmanteau full of money to pay our travelling expenses. He's sewed up beautiful, and in the bay you can drop him to the bottom."

Joe Johnson's face became almost livid pale, and, rushing upon Patty Cannon with both hands raised, he struck her to the floor and put his boot upon her.

"If I had time, I'd have your life," he hissed. "But it would lose the uptucker a job. To-night I leave you forever. Margaretta, your daughter, wishes never to see you again. Take this crib and the blood you still must shed to keep your old heart warm, and take my curse to choke you on the gallows!"

He rushed away and gave a low whistle at the window; Daw and Joe's brother, Ebenezer, a lower set and more sinister being, bounded up the stairs and loosened and drove before them the little band of captives.

"One word from you, white nigger, in all this journey to-day, scatters your brains in the woods!"

Joe Johnson drew a pistol as he spoke, and Jimmy Phoebus saw his nervous determination too clearly to provoke it.

"Now, put this dab upon the wagon," Johnson said, referring to the bed, and it was carried down by the brothers, and the dead man's portmanteau thrown in beside it.

"Joe! Joe!" came the voice of Patty Cannon, from the guest's room, "take the poor old woman that's raised you along."

"Stow yer wid!" he answered; "we go to be gentlemen in a land where you would spot us black. Cross cove and mollisher no more; raise another Joe Johnson, if you can, to make this old hulk lush with business: I give it to you."

He was gone in the vague dawn. She fell upon her face across the little bar and moaned,

"A pore, pore, pore old woman!"

How long she had been leaning there she did not know, till familiar sounds fell on her ears, and, looking up with a cry of recognition, she shouted,

"Van Dorn! God bless you, Van Dorn! Is you alive again?"

The Captain was supported in the arms of another person, who took him, ghastly pale, into the little bar and laid him upon her pallet, muttering,

"I loved him as I never loved A male."

* * * * *

The morning was well advanced, and the sun made the gaunt and steep old tavern rise like a mammoth from the level lands, and filled its upper front rooms with golden wine of light, as Patty Cannon sat in one of them by a window near the piazza, and talked to Van Dorn, whom she had tenderly washed and re-dressed, and placed him in her own comfortable rocking-chair of rushes, with his feet raised, as all unaffected Americans like, and blanketed, upon a second chair.

Her woes and his relief made Patty social, yet tender, and the instincts of her sex had returned, to be petted and beloved.

"Oh, Captain," she said, fondly, "how clean and sweet you look, like my good man again. Don't be cross to me, Van Dorn! My heart is sad."

"Chito, Patty! chito! Fie! you sad? I like to see you saucy and defiant. Let us not repent! So Joe has left you?"

"With cruel curses. My daughter hates me, he says, and means to be a lady where I can't disgrace her. Oh, honey! to raise a child and have it hate an' despise you goes hard, even if I have been bad. There's nothing left me now but you, Van Dorn; oh, do not die!"

He coughed carefully, as if coughing was a luxury to be very mildly exerted, and wiped a little blood from his tongue and lip.

"I'll try not to die till I comfort you some, Marta delicioso! The ball is at my windpipe, and, when the blood trickles in, it makes me cough, and I must beware of emotions, the surgeon says, lest it drop into my lung and break a blood-vessel by some very spasmodic cough. So do not be too beautiful or I might perish."

He stroked his long yellow mustache with the diamond-fingered hand, and drew his velvet smoking-cap tight upon his silken curls, but he was too pale to blush as formerly, though he lisped as much, like a modest boy.

"Captain," the woman said, pleased to crimson, "you are so much smarter than me I'm afeard of you. Am I beautiful a little yet? Do I please you? I know you mock me."

"O hala hala!" sighed Van Dorn. "You are the star of my life. All that I am, you have made me. Patty, I worship you. When you are gone, human nature will breathe and wonder. Do you remember when first we met?"

"A little, Captain. Tell it to me again. Praise me if you kin. I'm almost desolate."

Her lip trembled, and she glanced at the fields across the way, she had so long inhabited, where, as it seemed to her, more life than ever was visible to-day, though she did not look carefully.

"How many years it has been, Patty, we will not tell. I was coming home from Africa with an emigrant, a Briton, my capturer, indeed—that officer in the blockading squadron on that coast who seized my privateer, the Ida, with all her complement of Guinea slaves. His name was all I took from him—you got the rest—Van Dorn!"

She stole a startled look at him out of her listening eyes, as if this might be unpleasant talk, but he parried it with a compliment.

"Chis! Dios! What a family of beauties you were! Betty, with her hoyden air, and Jane, with her wealth of charms, and Patty, with her bold, rich eyes and conquering will. We sailed into the Nanticoke by mistake for the Manokin. My friend had pitied my misfortunes and liked my company, and, when he broke me up as a slaver—having already been broken as a privateer—had said: 'Dennis, that country you praise so well has infatuated me; I'll resign my commission and buy a little vessel, and settle in America with you for the sake of my dear little daughter, Hulda Van Dorn.' Ayme! that poor little wild-flower: where did she spend the chill night yesterday, Patty, can you tell?"

He coughed again, very carefully, and his eye, the brighter for his fretted lungs, never left his hostess, as though he feared she might overlook some pleasing feature of his story. She trotted her foot and muttered:

"You made me jealous of her: I got to hate an' fear her, lovey."

"Voluptuous as two young widowers were after a long cruise, we tarried among you sirens, myself almost at the threshold of my home, where my wife believed me dead, yet waited longingly and waits this morn, dear Patty. Dios da fe! My friend, entasselled with bright Betty, sooner felt remorse at the spectacle of his little child so ill-caressed, and beckoned me away; but he had shown his gold, and could better be spared than reckless I. You know the cool, deep game, dear Pat. Hala ha! I was made to buy the poison you sisters gave Van Dorn, and seem the accomplice in his death: never till this week has that murder given up a testimony—the portion of the dead man's coin your mother stole and hid, which Hulda inherited at last. Verdad es verde! I became afraid to leave you: I am here at the death with you, my old enchantress."

A crack ran through the empty wooden house, which made her rise; Van Dorn, as he was called, enjoyed her uneasiness, like a pallid mask painted with a smile.

"Captain," she said, "how many people I see out yonder in the fields! Maybe thar's to be a fox-chase."

"Sit, Patty! Let me drink, in my last days of life, the wine lees of your memory. You are so dear to me! Turn in the golden sun, that I may linger on that face which autumn's ashes fall upon, though through the dead leaves I see the russet colors smoulder yet! How daring was your girlhood: the poor blacksmith farmer, whose name you will transmit forever, fretted you with his sickness and his scruples, and, he aqui! you stilled him with the same cup you mixed for Betty's husband. His daughter you gave to wife to his apprentice, a strong, stolid man, capable of heroism, Patty, for he died for you, his dear misleader, on the shameful scaffold, though all the crowd knew who his instigator was; but, like a man, he died and never told."

"Van Dorn, you hurt me," Patty broke out; "I cannot laugh to-day, and these tales depress me, honey. Where shall we go when you are well?"

"La gente pone, y Dios dispone! Stay yet, and chat awhile. I would not, for the world, see you discouraged,—you, unfathomable angel! who, in this mangy corner of the globe, looked abroad over the land like Catherine, from her sterile throne, over the mighty steppes, and levied war upon the hopes of man. How you did trouble Uncle Sam, great Patty, robbing his mails for years between Baltimore and the Brandywine! Young Nichols still serves his term for that shrewd trick you taught him, of cutting the mail-bags open as he sat, with the corrupted drivers, on the crowded stage, stealthily throwing the valuable letters in the road, to be gathered by a following horseman.[10] Es admirable! Young Perry Hutton, reared by you to kidnap, then to drive the mail and filch its letters—a Delaware boy, too—perished on the gallows for killing a mail-driver more scrupulous than himself, who detected him under his mask.[11] Young Moore—was he your connection, darling?—stopping the mail-stage at the Gunpowder Forge, fell under the driver's buckshot.[12] And Hare—"

"Captain," called Patty, "I see men and boys all over the fields yonder, running and digging and dragging away the bresh. Is them ole buryins of mine suspected?"

"Pshaw! darling, 'tis your warm imagination, and Joe's unkindness. I would make you happy with the memory of your daring acts. Que maravilla! In your little pets you stamped a life out, when another 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 without rest for many nights, and sleep soon bound him in its own clevis and manacles.

When he awoke, so deep had been his slumber that he could not recall for a moment where he was. The tiller was unmanned, the stars shone in the cabin hatchway, a cold bilge-water draft blew through the old hulk, and, as he dragged himself up the steps, he saw tall woods near by, and heard the voice of solemn pines.

The vessel was aground; wild geese were making jubilant shrieks as they cut the water with their fleecy wings, like cameo engraving; the outlaw gazed and gazed, and finally muttered:

"Deil's Island, or I'm a billy noodle! I run from it the last time I was yer, an' my blood runs cold to be yer agin; my daddy got his curse from this camp-meetin'."

Taking speed from his apprehensions, Johnson slid back the hatchway and leaped into the hold, starlight and moonlight following him, and nothing did they reveal there except one man, peacefully sleeping upon his face, as Phoebus had last been seen.

The kidnapper shook his captive, but he did not awaken. He turned the man over, and there met his eyes the cold blue stare and Roman nose and bleeding lips of Allan McLane, apparently returned from the bottom of the river.

With a shriek, the outlaw bounded upon the deck and ran to the bow of the pungy.

"Help me!" came a faint cry from the forecastle, and, peeping in, Joe Johnson recognized one of his own familiars he had shipped at Cannon's Ferry, gagged, like his companion, and tied fast. The man had just been able to articulate.

"Now, spiflicate me!" spoke the skipper, relieving the man, "the ruffian cly you! who did this?"

"The white nigger did it all, Joe. He crawled through the stays to the cabin, and got your pistols, first; leastways, we found him an' the yaller feller at the helm on top of us, coming up the fo'castle, and next t'other two men jined 'em. They said ole Samson had give 'em the wink. We two was tied and throwed in yer, an' ef you had awaked, thar was a man to stab you to the heart, sot over you."

"The portmanteau?" cried Johnson.

"That's gone, I reckon. They sowed you up a feather an' oyster-shell man on a plank to heave overboard; that's what they said. They steered for Deil's Island, an' sot the Island Parson yer to watch that you don't git the pungy off, an' I reckon they're half-way to Princess Anne."

Joe Johnson heard no more. He released his creatures from their bonds, took the dead body in the pungy's canoe, and gave the command:

"Row fur the open bay! We'll strike St. Mary's County or Virginny. Bingavast! Hike! Never agin will I put foot on this Eastern Shore."

* * * * *

At Georgetown Jimmy Phoebus, Samson, and Levin Dennis met again, and Levin told the mystery of his father's disappearance.

"Never tell your mother, Levin, that Captain Dennis died in that Pangymonum; it would break her heart, and she never would trust man agin."

"Jimmy," spoke up Samson, "let her understand that he got wrecked on the Ida. It looks a little bad, but the slave-trade sounds better than kidnappin'."

"They say that Allan McLane owned that slave vessel," Phoebus put in; "but he didn't live to know his loss. He'll meet his heathens at the Judgment Seat."

"Who has fed mother?" Levin asked. "Hulda can't explain that."

"I kin, Levin," Samson Hat said, bashfully. "It was me. Good ole Meshach Milburn, that everybody's down on, pitied that pore woman, an' made me set things she needed in her window. He said if I ever told it he'd discharge me."

"Dog my skin!" Jimmy Phoebus observed, "the next man that calls 'steeple top' after ole Meshach I'll mash flat! But, come, my son, I've buried at Broad Creek your wife's family relics. We'll hire a wagon, and drive to ole Broad Creek 'piscopal church on the way, and there I'll have you married to Huldy."

The sword-hilt and coins were disinterred, and in that ancient edifice of hard pine, where the worship of her English race had long been celebrated, the naval officer's daughter became the wife of the son of his voluptuous and perverted friend. As Jimmy Phoebus kissed them he said:

"Levin, when your mother says 'Yes,' all four of us will settle in the West. Illinois has become a free state, after a hard fight, and I reckon that'll suit us."

* * * * *

For a while Patty Cannon, by her affability and sorrow, had easy times in jail, and was allowed to eat with the jailer's family; but, as the examination proceeded before the grand jury, and her menials hastened to throw their responsibility in so many crimes upon her alone, an outer opinion demanded that she be treated more harshly, and some of the irons she had manacled upon her captives were riveted upon her own ankles. Very soon dropsy began to appear in her legs and feet, and, after it became evident to her that neither money nor friends were forthcoming in her defence, she fell into a passive despair.

The frequent conferences between Jimmy Phoebus and Cy James led to the belief that not only had Hulda recovered portions of her father's money and valuables, hidden in the beehives and flower-pots old Patty had so assiduously attended, but that Phoebus had seized upon property indicated by the informer, and was to have whatever remained of it after procuring the latter's release.

This result was hastened by Patty Cannon's death, which happened, to the great relief of many respectably considered people in that region, who had feared from the first that she would make a minute confession, implicating everybody who had dealt with her band.

Among these was Judge Custis, who opened his skeleton-in-the-closet to John M. Clayton one spring-like day. Clayton had quietly prodded on the conviction of Patty Cannon, but the jealousy of the slaveholding interest made him wary of any open appearance against her.

They were sitting in the little parlor of the Methodist parsonage, a small frame house with a conical-roofed portico and big end-chimney, a little off from the public square, whither they had gone to send the pastor to wait on the aged Chancellor, who had been taken ill in the court-room, and lay in the hotel.

"Clayton," said Judge Custis, in a low tone of voice, "what this woman may do or tell, you would not think concerned me, but I will show you how deep her influence has reached, as well as explain to you why I would not pursue my own servants to her den. In this I humiliate myself before you, as I must do, if I am to become your client."

"You had been trading with Patty Cannon; I guessed that much."

"Such was the case. When I was a collegian at Yale, returning home one holiday, I fell in love with a beautiful quadroon, the property of my uncle, in Northampton County. She was an elegant woman, with a good education, and had been my playmate. I was ardent and good-looking, and easily found lodgment in her heart; but the conquest of her charms was long, and agonizing with sincere esteem. You must believe me when I declare that I fell dangerously ill because I was refused by her, and, making a confidant of my doctor, he told the girl that she must choose between my death and her surrender. Pity, then, prevailed, even over religion. I was happy in every point but one—the injury concealment worked upon her self-respect; for, Clayton, my mistress was my own cousin."

"Goy!"

"I never desired to marry, although no children had been born in my patriarchal relation; but, in the course of years, my uncle became pressed for debts, and he appealed to me to save my beautiful handmaiden from sale, he being in full sympathy with my relation to her, because she was his daughter."

"I goy!"

"The case was urgent. I possessed some negroes, the legacy of my mother. To sell them publicly would be a stigma both upon my humanity and my credit. I adopted the cowardly device of letting a kidnapper slip them away, and take a large commission for his trouble. I saved my lady, but at the expense of a secret."

"And that secret Joe Johnson depended on, Custis, when he was suddenly driven into your house, and found your old servant already demoralized by the announcement of your son-in-law?"

"The scoundrel pressed his advantage; and he saw, besides, my daughter—not Vesta, but her half-sister, Virgie—and, between his persecution of her and my brother-in-law's vindictiveness, poor Virgie was literally run to the ground and into it; she is in her grave."

Judge Custis broke into a long fit of sobbing, and Clayton, who had noticed his dejected mien since their separation, passed an arm around him, saying:

"Never mind, now! Never mind, old friend! Johnson is fled; McLane, they whisper, has never been seen since he entered Johnson's tavern. His will was found there, and your daughter gets her mother's property and servants back."

"I must finish my story," Judge Custis said, stanching his tears. "By the decline of every family with natural feelings and refinement, under what Mr. Pinkney termed 'the contaminating curse of reluctant bondsmen,' we, also, became poor. To save others, it was necessary that I must marry, and get money by my own prostitution. My God, how we are repaid! A bride was found for me in Baltimore, the sister of Allan McLane, and a beauty.

"I began my married life with the best intentions; my poor mistress herself advised me to turn to my wife, and become a true man. She told me so with her heart breaking. In heaven, where she dwells with my poor child, she hears me now, and knows I speak the truth!"

Judge Custis broke down again, and leaned his convulsed head on Clayton's tender breast, whose own widower's grief gushed forth responsively.

"Children were born in Teackle Hall; my servitude was becoming adjusted to me, when Allan McLane, in his love of vindictiveness and of low, formal respectability, conceived that my poor quadroon required some chastisement for having been his sister's rival, and he set a trap to buy her. I was forced to have her bought, to protect her, and to bring her to my care again, and thus our passion was revived, and, giving birth to Virgie, she died. Reared together, and unconscious of their kindred, those daughters loved each other as dearly as when, in heaven, they shall hide in the radiance of each other, and cover my sins with their angelic wings."