The Entailed Hat Part 51

The woman now turned her lamp on the sailor's rough, swarthy, injured countenance, and looked him over out of her dark, bold eyes:

"Joe, this is a n.i.g.g.e.r, by G.o.d!"

Johnson and the captain also examined him carefully, and, uttering an oath, the former kicked the prostrate man with his heavy boot.

"I popped this bloke last night," he said, "and thought the scold's cure had him. He's a sea-crab playin' the setter fur n.i.g.g.e.rs. He sang beef to me in Princess Anne. I told him thar he'd pa.s.s for a n.i.g.g.e.r, Patty, and we'll sell him fur one to Georgey!"

"All's fish that comes to our net, Joe," the woman chuckled; "he'll sell high, too."

"That white man," spoke the voice of Samson, within the pen, his chains rattling, "has hunderds of friends a-lookin' fur him, an' you'll ketch it if you don't let him off."

"What lat.i.tat chants there?" Joe Johnson demanded of Patty Cannon.

"That's my n.i.g.g.e.r, Joe," the woman answered.

"Fetch him to the light."

The captain propped Samson up, and Joe Johnson glared into his face, and then struck him down with the handle of his heavy whip.

"Patty," he growled, "that n.i.g.g.e.r's scienced; he's the champion sc.r.a.pper of Somerset. He knocked me down, and I marked him fur it; and now, by G.o.d! I'm a-goin' to burn him alive on Twiford's island."

He swore an oath, half blasphemous, half blackguard, and the captain murmured, with a lisp:

"The white man is the only _witness_. Make sure of him!"

Irons were produced, and the captain speedily fastened Phoebus's hands in a clevis, and hobbled his feet, and placed him, without brutality, in the pen, and, further, chained him there to a ring in the joist below.

As the door was closed and bolted, a voice from the darkness of the pen cried out:

"Aunt Patty, let me out: I saved the captain's life; I took the white man's knife. I'll serve you faithfully if you only let me go."

"He blowed the gab," said Joe Johnson, "but it won't serve him."

"Zeke," cried the woman, "it's no use. You go to Georgey with the next gang--you an' the white n.i.g.g.e.r thar."

The man threw himself upon the floor and moaned and prayed, as the lamplight disappeared and the hatchway slid echoingly over the stairs, and the lower bolts were drawn. As he lay there in horror and amid contempt, a voice arrested his ears near by, singing, with musical and easy spirit, so low that it seemed a hymn, from the roads and fields far down beneath:

"Deep-en de woun' dy hands have made In dis weak, helpless soul."

The man listened with awe and silence, as if a spirit hummed the tune, and forgot his doom of slavery a moment in the deeper anguish of a treacherous heart that simple hymn bestirred. It was only Jimmy Phoebus, thinking what he could say to punish this double traitor most, who had turned his back upon his race and upon grat.i.tude, and Jimmy had remembered the poor woman chained to the tree on Twiford's island, and her oft-reiterated hymn; and the conclusion was flashed upon his mind that the mulatto wretch who decoyed her away and sold her was none other than his renegade fellow-prisoner, in turn made merchandise of because too dangerous to set at large in the probable hue-and-cry for her.

"Poor Mary!" Phoebus slowly spoke, in his deepest tones, with solemn cadence.

The wretched man listened and trembled.

"Mary's sperrit's callin' 'Zeke!'" Phoebus continued, awful in his inflection.

The miserable procurer's heart stopped at the words, and his eyeb.a.l.l.s turned in torment.

"Come, Zeke! poor Mary's a-waitin' for ye!" cried the sailor, suddenly, in a voice of thunder, and as suddenly relapsed into the low singing of the quiet hymn again:

"Deep-en de woun' dy hands have made In dis weak, helpless soul, Till mercy, wid its mighty aid De-scen to make me whole; Yes, Lord!

De-scen to make me whole."

The elegant Iscariot, at the thunder of the invocation, had reached into a place between two of the cypress s.h.i.+ngles in the roof, where he had hidden the sailor's knife, the blade being pressed out of sight, and only the handle within his grasp. It had been overlooked in the exciting scenes of the previous few minutes, and now recurred to his mind, as superst.i.tious pa.s.sions rolled like dreadful meteors across the black and hopeless chasm of his despairing soul.

When the low drone of the hymn he had heard his victim sing to her baby, when her faith in him was pure and childlike, crossed his maddened ears again, he raised one shriek of "Mercy!" to which no answer fell, and drew the blade across his throat and fell dead in the kidnappers' den.

CHAPTER XXVI.

VAN DORN.

A thin fur of frost was on the level farm-lands, and the saffron and orange leaves were falling almost audibly from the trees, as Levin Dennis awoke on Wednesday, in the long, low house standing back in the fields from Johnson's cross-roads, and drank in the cool, stimulating morn, the sun already having made his first relay, and his postilion horn was blowing from the old tavern that reared its form so broadly and yet so steeply in plain sight.

Levin had been brought up from Twiford's wharf the night before by the pretty maid whom Jimmy Phoebus had so much frightened, and this was his first day of restful feeling, having slept off the liquor fumes of Sunday, the exciting watches of Monday, and the mingled pleasure and pain, illness and interest, love and remorse, of Tuesday.

He had felt already the earliest twinges of youthful fondness for the young girl he had spent the day with at Twiford's, while lying sick there from a disordered stomach and nervous system, and her amiability and charms, more than the temptation of unhallowed money, had changed his purpose to escape at Twiford's and give information of the injury inflicted upon Judge Custis's property.

It hardly seemed real that he had been an accessory to a felony and a witness to a murder--the stealing of a gentleman's domestic slaves and the braining of the smallest and most helpless of them, nearly in his sight; yet so it had happened, and he felt the danger he was in, but hesitated how to act. He had accepted the money of the trader, and pa.s.sed his mother's n.o.blest friend on the river without recognition, while a dastardly ball had probably ended poor Phoebus's career. To all these deeds he was the only white witness, the only one on whose testimony redress could be meted out.

He felt, therefore, that he was a prisoner, and his life dependent on his cordial relations with the b.l.o.o.d.y negro-dealer and his band; and Johnson had reiterated his promise that if Levin joined them in equal fraternity he should make money fast and become a plantation proprietor.

This night coming, a raid on free negroes in Delaware was to be made by the band in force, and Levin had been told that he must be one of the kidnappers, and his frank co-operation that night would forever relieve him of any suspicions of defection and bad faith.

"Steal one n.i.g.g.e.r, Levin," Joe Johnson had said, "and then if ever caught in the hock you never can snickle!"

Levin interpreted this thieves' language to mean that he must do a crime to get the kidnappers' confidence.

The power of this band he had divined a little of when, at points along the river, especially about Vienna, there had been mysterious intercourse between Joe Johnson and people on the sh.o.r.e, carried on in imitations of animal sounds; and the negro ferryman at that old Dorchester village had spoken with Johnson only half an hour before the trader's encounter with Jimmy Phoebus in mid-stream, whereupon the grim pa.s.senger had produced his pistol and notified Levin:

"Now, my feller prig, honor's what I expect from you, and, to remind you of it, Levin, I'm a-goin' to pint this barking-iron at your mummer, so that if you patter a cackle, a blue plum will go right down your throat."

He had then tried to evade some one expected on the river, and, in a fit of rage at the awakening and wailing of the child, had hushed it forever, and then had shot Phoebus down.

Poor Hominy had sincerely believed that Johnson's peculiar slang was the language of the good Quakers, followers of Elias Hicks, who sheltered runaway slaves and spoke a "thee" and "thou" and "verily," and that strange misapprehension in her ignorant mind the keen dealer had made use of to decoy her into Levin's vessel and waft her into a distant country.

"We didn't steal her, Levin," Johnson said; "she wanted to mizzle from a good master, an' we jess sells the crooked moke an' makes it squar."

When Aunt Hominy, having under her protecting care the little children, came on board the _Ellenora Dennis_ at Manokin Landing, Levin had been asleep, and knew nothing of the theft till it was too late to protest, and Johnson himself had sailed the cat-boat into broad water. Then, bearing through Kedge's Strait, he had cruised up the open bay, out of sight of the Somerset sh.o.r.e, and entered the Nantic.o.ke towards night by way of Harper's Strait, and run up on the night flood; but the instinct of Jimmy Phoebus had cut him off at the forks of the Nantic.o.ke, and propelled another crime to Johnson's old suspected record. He had never been indicted yet for murder, though murder was thought to be none too formidable a crime for him.

There was a zest of adventure in this guilty errand, which, but for its crime, would have pleased Levin moderately well, the roving drop in his blood expanding to this wild a.s.sociation; and he knew but little comparatively of the Delaware kidnappers, reading nothing, and in those days little was printed about Patty Cannon's band except in the distant journals like _Niles's Register_ or _Lundy's Genius of Emanc.i.p.ation_.

Levin had never sailed up the Nantic.o.ke region before, and its scenery was agreeable to his sight, while his heart was just fluttering in the first flight of sentiment towards the interesting creature he had so unexpectedly and, as he thought, so strangely discovered there.

Arriving at Twiford's in the night, Johnson had sent him to bed there, and pushed on himself with the negro property to Johnson's Cross-roads; and, when he awakened late the next day, Levin had found a beautiful wildflower of a young woman sitting by his pallet, looking into his large soft eyes with her own long-lashed orbs of humid gray, and brus.h.i.+ng his dark auburn ringlets with her hand. As he had looked up wonderingly, she had said to him: