The elegant Iscariot, at the thunder of the invocation, had reached into a place between two of the cypress shingles 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 superstitious passions 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 passed his mother's noblest 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 bloody 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 nigger, 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 shore, 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 passenger 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 shore, and entered the Nanticoke 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 Nanticoke, 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 association; 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 Emancipation. Levin had never sailed up the Nanticoke 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 brushing his dark auburn ringlets with her hand. As he had looked up wonderingly, she had said to him:

"I have never seen a man before with his hair parted in the middle, but I think I have dreamed of one."

"Who air you?" Levin asked.

"Me! Oh, I'm Hulda. I'm Patty Cannon's granddaughter."

"That wicked woman!" Levin exclaimed. "Oh, I can't believe that!"

"Nor can I sometimes, till the sinful truth comes to me from her own bold lips. Oh, sir, I am not as wicked as she!"

"How kin you be wicked at all," Levin asked, "when you look so good? I would trust your face in jail."

"Would you? How happy that makes me, to be trusted by some one! Nobody seems to trust me here. My mother was never kind to me. Captain Van Dorn is kind, but too kind; I shrink from him."

"Where is your mother now?"

"She has gone south with her husband, to live in Florida for all the rest of her life, and we are all going there after father gets one more drove of slaves. You are one of father's men, I suppose?"

"Who is your father?"

"Joe Johnson."

"That man," murmured Levin. "Oh, no, it is too horrible."

"Do not hate me. Be a little kind, if you do, for I have watched you here hours, almost hoping you never might wake up, so beautiful and pure you looked asleep."

"And you—that's the way you look, Huldy. How kin you look so an' be his daughter."

"I am not his child, thank God! He is my stepfather."

"What is your name, then, besides Huldy?"

The girl blushed deeply and hesitated. Her fine gray eyes were turned upon her beautiful bare feet, white as the river that flashed beneath the window.

"Hulda Bruinton," she said, swallowing a sigh.

"Bruinton—where did I hear that name?" Levin asked; "some tale has been told me, I reckon, about him?"

"Yes, everybody knows it," Hulda said, in a voice of pain; "he was hanged for murder at Georgetown when I was a little child."

Levin could not speak for astonishment.

"I might as well tell you," she said, "for others will, if I conceal it. I can hardly remember my father. My mother soon married Joe and neglected me, and Aunt Patty, my grandmother, brought me up. She was kind to me, but, oh, how cruel she can be to others!"

"You talk as if you kin read, Huldy," said Levin, wishing to change so harsh a topic; "kin you?"

"Yes, I can read and write as well as if I had been to school. Some one taught me the letters around the tavern—some of the negro-dealers: I think it was Colonel McLane; and I had a gift for it, I think, because I began to read very soon, and then Aunt Patty made me read books to her—oh, such dreadful books!"

"What wair they, Huldy?"

"The lives of pirates and the trials of murderers—about Murrell's band and the poisonings of Lucretia Chapman, the execution of Thistlewood, and Captain Kidd's voyages; the last I read her was the story of Burke and Hare, who smothered people to death in the Canongate of Edinburgh last year to sell their bodies to the doctors."

"Must you read such things to her?"

"I think that is the only influence I have over her. Sometimes she looks so horribly at me, and mutters such threats, that I fear she is going to kill me, and so I hasten to get her favorite books and read to her the dark crimes of desperate men and women, and she laughs and listens like one hearing pleasant tales. My soul grows sick, but I see she is fascinated, and I read on, trying to close my mind to the cruel narrative."

"Huldy, air you a purty devil drawin' me outen my heart to ruin me?"

"No, no; oh, do not believe that! I suppose all men are cruel, and all I ever knew were negro-traders, or I should believe you too gentle to live by that brutal work. I looked at you lying in this bed, and pity and love came over me to see you, so young and fair, entering upon this life of treachery and sin."

Levin gazed at her intently, and then raised up and looked around him, and peered down through the old dormers into the green yard, and the floody river hastening by with such nobility.

"Air we watched?" he inquired.

"By none in this house. All the men are away, making ready for the hunt to-morrow night. The river is watched, and you would not be let escape very far, but in this house I am your jailer. Joe told me he would sell me if I let you get away."

Levin listened and looked once more ardently and wonderingly at her, and fell upon his knees at her uncovered feet.

"Then, Huldy, hear me, lady with such purty eyes,—I must believe in 'em, wicked as all you look at has been! I never stole anything in my life, nor trampled on a worm if I could git out of his path,—so help me my poor mother's prayers! Huldy, how shall I save myself from these wicked men and the laws I never broke till Sunday? Oh, tell me what to do!"

"Do anything but commit their crimes," she answered. "Promise me you will never do that! Let us begin, and be the friends I wished we might be, before I ever heard you speak. What is your name?"

"Levin—Levin Dennis. My father's lost to me, and mother, too."

"Then Heaven has answered my many prayers, Levin, to give me something to cherish and protect. I am almost a woman: oh, what is my dreadful doom?—to become a woman here among these wolves of men, who meet around my stepfather's tavern to buy the blood and souls of people born free. Joe Johnson sells everything; he has often threatened to sell me to some trader whose bold and wicked eyes stared at me so coarsely, and I have heard them talk of a price, as if I was the merchandise to be transferred—I, in whose veins every drop of blood is a white woman's."?

"I want you to watch over me, Huldy: I'm a poor drunken boy, my boat chartered to Joe Johnson fur a week an' paid fur. Tell me what to do, an' I'll do it."

"First," she said, "you must eat something and drink milk—nothing stronger. Their brandy, which they 'still themselves, sets people on fire. I will set the table for you."

It was after the table had been set that Jimmy Phoebus slipped in and devoured the milk and meat, overhearing the continuance of the conversation just given; and when his awkward motions had disturbed these new young friends, Hulda fainted on the stairs before the apparition Levin did not see, and he snatched the kiss that was like plucking a pale-red blossom from some dragon's garden.

That night two horses without saddles came to bring them both to Johnson's Cross-roads, and Levin awoke at Patty Cannon's old residence on the neighboring farm.

He looked out of the small window in the low roof Upon a little garden, where a short, stout, powerfully made woman, barefooted, was taking up some flowers from their beds to put them into boxes of earth.

"Yer, Huldy," exclaimed this woman, "sot 'em all under the glass kivers, honey, so grandmother will have some flowers for her hat next winter. They wouldn't know ole Patty down at Cannon's Ferry ef she didn't come with flowers in her hat."

A mischievous blue-jay was in a large cherry-tree, apparently domesticated there, and he occupied himself mimicking over the woman's head the alternate cries of a little bird in terror and a hawk's scream of victory.

"Shet up, you thief!" spoke the woman, looking up. "Them blue-jays, gal, the niggers is afeard of, and kills 'em, as Ole Nick's eavesdroppers and tale-carriers. That's why I keeps 'em round me. They's better than a watch-dog to bark at strangers, and, caze they steals all their life, I love' em. Blue-jay, by Ged! is ole Pat Cannon's bird."

"Grandma," Hulda said, "I wish you had a large, elegant garden. You love flowers."

"Purty things I always would have," exclaimed the bulldog-bodied woman, with an oath; "bright things I loved when I was a gal, and traded what I had away fur 'em. Direckly I got big, I traded ugly things fur 'em, like niggers. I'd give a shipload of niggers fur an apern full of roses."

"Florida, they say, is beautiful, grandma, and flowers are everywhere there."

"Yes, gal, they says so; but I don't never expect to go thar. Margaretty, your mommy, likes it thar. Delaware's my home; some of 'em hates me yer, and the darned lawyers tries to indict me, but I'll live on the line till they shoves me over it, whar I've been cock of the walk sence I was a gal."

As Hulda, also barefooted, but moulded like the flowers, so that her feet seemed natural as the naked roots, carried the boxes around to the glass beds encircling a chimney—dahlias, autumnal crocuses or saffrons, tri-colored chrysanthemums or gold-flowers, and the orange-colored marigolds—the elder woman, resting on her hoe, smelled the turpentine of a row of tall sunflowers and twisted one off and put it in her wide-brimmed Leghorn hat.

"When I hornpipe it on the tight rope," Levin heard her chuckle, "one of these yer big flowers must die with me."

She disappeared into the peach orchard, which tinted the garden with its pinkish boughs, and Levin improved the chance to look over the cottage and the landscape.

It was a mere farm, level as a floor, part of a larger clearing in the primeval woods, where only fire or age had preyed since man was come; and, although there seemed more land than belonged to this property, no other house could Levin see over all the prospect except the bold and tarnished form of Johnson's castle, sliding its long porch forward at the base of that tall, blank, inexpressive roof which seemed suspended like the drab curtain of a theatre between the solemn chimney towers; the northern chimney broad and huge, and bottomed on an arch; the southern chimney leaner, but erect as a perpetual sentry on the King's road.

The house where Levin Dennis now looked out was a three-roomed, frame, double cabin, with beds in every room but the kitchen, and the hip-roof gave considerable bed accommodation in the attic besides, the rooms being all small, as was general in that day. Around the house extended a pretty garden, with some cherry and plum trees and wild peach along its boundaries, and the fields around contained many stumps, showing that the clearing had been made not many years before, while here and there some heaps of brush had been allowed to accumulate instead of being burned.

As Levin looked at one of those brush-heaps in a low place, a pair of buzzards slowly and clumsily circled up from it, and, flying low, went round and round as if they might be rearing their young there and hated to go far; and, for long afterwards, Levin saw them hovering high above the spot in parental mindfulness.

He drew his head in the dormer casement, and was making ready to go down to the breakfast he smelled cooking below, when his own name was pronounced in the garden, and he stopped and listened.

"You lie!" exclaimed the old woman's voice. "I'll mash you to the ground!"

"He said so, grandma, indeed he did."

Levin had a peep from the depths of the garret, and he saw that Mrs. Cannon was standing with the hoe she had been using raised over Hulda's head, while a demoniac expression of rage distorted her not unpleasing features.

Levin walked at once to the window and whistled, as if to the bird in the tree. The older woman immediately dropped her hoe, and cried out to Levin:

"Heigh, son! ain't you most a-starved fur yer breakfast? It's all ready fur ye, an' Huldy's waitin' fur ye to come down."

Levin at once went down the short, winding stairs to a table spread in the kitchen end, and the old woman blew a tin horn towards Johnson's Cross-roads, as if summoning other boarders, and then she said to Levin, with a very pleasing countenance:

"Son, these yer no-count people will be askin' you questions to bother you, and I don't want no harm to come to you, Levin; so you tell everybody you see yer that Levin Cannon is your name, and they'll think you's juss one o' my people, and won't ask you no more."

Hulda slightly raised her eyes, which Levin took to mean assent, and he said:

"Cannon's good enough for a body pore as me."

"You're a-goin' with Joe to-night, ain't you?"

"Yes'm, I b'leeves so."

"That's right, cousin. You'll git rich an' keep your chariot, yit. Captain Van Dorn's gwyn to head the party. As Levin Cannon, ole Patty's pore cousin, he'll look out fur you, son. Now have some o' my slappers, an' jowl with eggs, an' the best coffee from Cannon's Ferry. Huldy, gal, help yer Cousin Levin! He won't be your sweetheart ef you don't feed him good."

The breakfast was brought in by a white man with a face scratched and bitten, and one eye full of congested blood.

"Cy," Patty Cannon cried, "them slappers, I 'spect, you had hard work to turn with that red eye Owen Daw give you."

"I'll brown both sides of him yit, when I git the griddle ready for him," the man exclaimed, half snivelling.

"Before you raise gizzard enough for that, little Owen'll peck outen yer eyes, Cy, like a crow; he's game enough to tackle the gallows. You may git even with him thar, Cy."

The man turned his cowardly, serving countenance on Levin inquisitively, and looked sullen and ashamed at Hulda, who observed:

"Cyrus, you are not fit for the rude boys around father's tavern, who always impose on you. Please don't go there again."

"Where else kin he go?" inquired Patty Cannon, severely; "thar ain't no church left nigh yer, sence Chapel Branch went to rot for want of parsons' pay. Let him go to the tavern and learn to fight like a man, an' if the boys licks him, let him kill some of 'em. Then Joe and the Captain kin make somethin' of Cy James, an' people around yer'll respect him. Why, Captain, honey, ain't ye hungry?"

This was addressed to a man with several bruises on his forehead, and an enormous flaxen mustache, as soft in texture as a child's hair—a man wearing delicate boots with high Flemish leggings, that curled over and showed full women's hose of red, over which were buckled trousers of buff corduroy, covering his thighs only, and fastened above his hips by a belt of hide. His shirt was of blue figured stuff, and his loose, unbuttoned coat was a kind of sailor's jacket of tarnished black velvet. He hung a broad slouched hat of a yellowish-drab color, soft, like all his clothing, upon a peg in the wall, and bowed to Hulda first with a smile of welcome, to Madame Cannon cavalierly, and to Levin with a graceful reserve that attracted the boy's attention from the notorious woman at he head of the table, and held him interested during all the meal.

"Pretty Hulda, I salute you! Patty, buenos dias! I hope I see you well, friend!"—the last to Levin.

As he took up his knife and fork Levin observed a ring, with a pure white diamond in it, flash upon the Captain's hand. He was a blue-eyed man, with a blush and a lisp at once, as of one shy, but at times he would look straight and bold at some one of the group, and then he seemed to lose his delicacy and become coarse and cold. One such look he gave at Hulda, who bowed her eyes before it, and looked at him but little again.

To Levin this man had the greatest fascination, partly from his extraordinary dress—like costumes Levin had seen at the theatre in Baltimore, where the pirates on the stage wore a jacket and open shirt and belt similar in cut though not in material—and partly from his countenance, in which was something very familiar to the boy, though he racked his memory in vain for the time and place. The stranger was hardly more than forty to forty-five years of age, but the mistress of the house treated him with all the blandishments of a husband.

"Dear Captain! pore honey!" she said; "to have his beautiful yaller hair tored out by the nigger hawk! Honey, he fell onto me, and I thought a bull had butted me in the stummick."

"He broke no limbs, Patty," the captain lisped, feeding himself in a dainty way—and Levin observed that his fork was silver, and his knife was a clasp-knife with a silver handle, that he had taken from his pocket—"Chis! chis! if he had snapped my arm, the caravan must have gone without me to-night. I am sore, though, for Senor was a valiant wrestler."

"He'll git his pay, honey, when they sot him to work in Georgey an' flog him right smart, an' we spend the price of him fur punch. He, he! lovey lad!"

"I took this from him to-day when I searched him carefully," the captain said, handing Patty Cannon a piece of silver coin.

The woman, though she looked to be little more than fifty years of age, drew out spectacles of silver from an old leather case, and putting them on, spelled out the coin:

"George—three—eighteen—eighteen hunderd-and-fifteen!"

She threw up her head so quickly that the spectacles dropped from her nose, and Hulda caught them, and then Mrs. Cannon turned on Hulda with a ferocious expression and snatched the spectacles from her hand.

"Whar did the devil git it?" Patty Cannon asked.

"Ah! who knows?" the Captain lisped with pale nonchalance, giving one of those strong, piercing looks he sometimes afforded, right into the hostess's eyes. "It might be a coincidence: chis! chito! A shilling of a certain year is no rare thing. But, Madame Cannon, it becomes slightly curious when six such shillings, all numbered with that significant year, came out of the same pocket!"

With this he passed five shillings of the same appearance over to the hostess, and she put on her spectacles again and looked at them all, and dropped them in her lap with a weary yet frightened expression, and muttered:

"Van Dorn, who kin he be?"

"That is of less consequence, my dear, than whether we can afford to sell him."

The Captain was now looking at Hulda with the same strong intentness, but her eyes were in her plate; and, though Madame Cannon looked at her, too, with both interest and dislike, Hulda quietly ate on, unconscious of their regard.

"Shoo!" the woman said; "people kin scare theirselves every day if they mind to. We've got him, and, if he knows anything, it's all in that nigger noddle. So eat and be derned!"

"My guardian angel," the Captain remarked, with a blush and a stronger lisp, "you may not have observed that I have never ceased to eat, while you immediately lost your appetite. What will you do with the shillings?"

Mrs. Cannon took them from her lap, and rose as if she meant to throw them out of the window, her angry face bearing that interpretation.

"Stop, remarkable woman," the Captain said, pulling his soft, flaxen mustache with the diamond-flashing hand, "let your fecund resources stop and counsel, for I am only looking to your happiness, that has so abundantly blessed my life and banished every superstition from my heart till I believe in neither ghosts, nor God, nor devil, while you believe in all of them, and give yourself many such unnecessary friends and intruders. Chito! chito! as the Cubans say, and hear my suggestion before you throw away those shillings!"

"Take care how you mock me!" cried Patty Cannon, with her dark, bold eyes furtive, like one both angered and troubled, and her ruddy cheeks full of cloudy blood.

"Sit down! Give the shillings to pretty Hulda there."

"To her?"

"Ya, ya! to pleasing Hulda; for what will trouble us then, her sinless bosom being their safe depository, and her long-lashed eyes melting our ghosts to gray air?"

With a look of strong dislike, the woman gave Hulda the shillings, saying:

"If you ever show one of 'em to me, gal, I'll make you swaller it."

Hulda took the silver pieces and looked at them a moment with girlish delight:

"Oh, grandma, how kind you are! Why do you speak so mad at me when you give me these pretty things? They seem almost warm in my bosom as I put them there, like things with life. Let me kiss you for them!"

She rose from the chair and approached the mistress of the house, who sat in a strange terror, not forbidding the embrace, yet almost shuddering as Hulda stooped and pressed her pure young lips to the blanched and dissipated face of Patty Cannon.

The Captain looked at the kiss with his peculiar strong, cold look, and smiled at Hulda graciously and said:

"There, ladies, repose in each other's confidence! A few shillings for such a kiss is shameful pay, Aunt Patty. Do you remember as well as I do, Madame Cannon, that once you missed some money, and thought your mother had stolen it, and hunted everywhere for it, and it never came to light?"

"Yes," cried Patty Cannon, "I do," and swore a man's oath.

"Has the Senor been in that direction, do you think? I think he has, for Melson and Milman are up from Twiford's with the news that Zeke's last hide has burst her chain and fled, and all the lower Nanticoke gives no trace of her, and Zeke has passed the heavenly gates."

The Captain drew the back of his silver clasp-knife across his throat, smilingly, and placed on the table a sailor's sheath-knife.

"Zeke only was untied; it was a too generous omission," he said. "The Philadelphia woman the Senor says he set free, and that she has gone to start an alarm against us. The Senor is a cool man: he told me that, and laughed and roared, and says he will live to see us all in a picture-frame. Ayme, ayme, Patty!"

With her face growing longer and longer, the woman heard these scarcely intelligible sentences—wholly unintelligible to the younger people—and to Levin it seemed that she grew suddenly old and yet older, till her cheeks, but lately blooming, seemed dead and wrinkled, and, from maintaining the appearance of hardly fifty, and fair at that, she now looked to be more than sixty years of age, and sad and helpless.

"Van Dorn, I'm dying," she muttered, as her eyes glazed, and she settled down in her chair like a lump of dough.

"Ha! O hala hala! hands off, fair Hulda," the Captain cried, joyfully, as Hulda had been moved to relieve the poor old woman; "no one shall assist at these ceremonies of expiation but Van Dorn himself, whose rights in Mistress Cannon are of priority. She's dropsical, and hastening to perdition too soon, which I must arrest and let her comfort me still more. Sweet comforter! Young gentleman, you shall help me."

Levin took hold of Patty Cannon's feet and found that she seemed made of bone, so tough were her sinews, and Van Dorn easily lifted her broad shoulders, and so she was laid on a bed in the next room, where the elegant Captain was seen rubbing her limbs, and even handling a bottle of leeches, one of which he allowed to crawl over the hand that wore the diamond, making it look like a ruby melting or in living motion. As this voracious blood-lover took his fill around the straight ankles of the hostess, the dainty Captain held her in his arms like an ardent lover.

"Honey," sighed the woman, "my rent is due, and Jake Cannon never waits. Take Huldy and this yer new recruit, my cousin Levin Cannon, an' drive 'em to the ferry,—an' watch that boy, Van Dorn: I want him broke in! Give him a pistol and a knife, an' have him cut somebody. Put the blood-mark on him and he's ours."

"Great woman!" the Captain lisped, prolific of his kisses, "Maria Theresa! Semiramis! Agrippina! Cleopatra! ever fecund in great ideas and growing youthful by nightshade, alto! quedo! but I love thee!"

"Am I young a little yit, honey?" asked Patty Cannon. "Oh, don't deceive me, Van Dorn! Can my eyes look love an' hate, like old times?"

"Si! quiza! More and more, dark angel, entering into black age like torches in a cave, I see your deep eyes flame; but never do they please me, Patty, as when they flash on some new wicked idea, like this of marking the boy for life. Who is he?"

"He's a Cannon, one of the stock that my Delaware man belonged to. His mother looked down on me fur coming in their family: I have remembered her."

"You want your young cousin made a felon, then?"

"Yes, honey, I want him scorched, so the devil will know him fur his own."

The Captain reached down to the lady's feet and pulled off the leech and held it up against his hollow palm, gorged with the blood of the fair patient.

"See, Patty! The boy shall drink blood like this, till, drunk with it, he can hold on no more, and drops into our fate as in this vial."

As he spoke he let the leech fall in the bottle, where its reflection in the glass seemed to splash blood.

"Ha, ha! Van Dorn, I love you!" the woman cried, and smothered him with caresses.



CHAPTER XXVII.

CANNON'S FERRY.

When it was announced to Levin and Hulda, who had meantime been talking in the garden, dangerously near the subject of love, that they were to be given a ride to Cannon's Ferry with Captain Van Dorn, at the especial desire of Aunt Patty Cannon—who also sent them a handful of half-cents to spend—they were both delighted, though Hulda said:

"Dear Levin, if it was only ourselves going for good, how happy we might be! I could live with your beautiful mother and work for her, and, knowing me to be always there, you would bring your money home instead of wasting it."

"Can't we do so some way?" asked Levin. "Oh, I wish I had some sense! I wish Jimmy Phoebus was yer, Huldy, to take me out thair in the garden an' whip me like my father. But, if I hadn't come yer, how could I have seen you, Huldy?"

"How could I have spent such a heavenly night of peace and hope if you had not come, dear? The Good Being must have led you to me."

"Huldy," said Levin, after thinking to the range of his knowledge, "maybe thar's a post-office at Cannon's Ferry, an' you kin write a letter to Jack Wonnell fur me."

"Why not to your mother, Levin?"

"Oh, I am ashamed to tell her; it would kill her."

"If we should be found out, Levin, Aunt Patty would kill me. There is no paper here, no ink that I can get, the postage on a letter is almost nineteen cents, and, look! these half-cents are short of the sum by just two."

"I have gold," cried Levin, thinking of the residue of Joe Johnson's bounty.

He put his hand into his pocket, but the money was no longer there.

"Hush!" cried Hulda, "you have been robbed. Everybody is robbed who sleeps here. Grandma can smell gold like the rat that finds yellow cheese."

The individual who had served the breakfast was seen coming towards them, a man in size, with a low forehead, no chin to speak of, a long, crane neck, and a badly scratched and festered face.

"Mister," he said to Levin, "come help me hitch the horses; I'm beat so I can't see how."

Levin started at once, suggesting to Hulda to make search for his missing money, and, when they were in the little stable, the man observed, in a whisper, to Levin:

"By smoke!"

Levin went on putting the bridles and breeching on the horses, when the man said again, with an insinuating grin:

"By smoke!"

"Heigh?" exclaimed Levin.

"By smoke!" the man remarked again, with a very ardent emphasis.

"You must have been in Prencess Anne," Levin said, "to swar 'by smoke.'"

The ill-raised man, with such an inferior head and cranish neck, now slipped around to the front of Levin and looked down on him, and whispered:

"Hokey-pokey!"

The idea crossed Levin's mind that the scullion of Patty Cannon must have gone crazy.

"Whair did you pick up them words, Cy?" Levin asked.

"Hokey-pokey!" answered Cy James, with a more mysterious and impressive sufflation; "Hokey-pokey! By smoke! and Pangymonum, too!"

"Why, Cy! what do you mean? Jimmy Phoebus never swars but in them air words. Do you know Jimmy Phoebus?"

"Pangymonum, too!" hissed Cy James, with every animation. "Hokey-pokey, three! an' By smoke, one!"

He put his long arms on his knees, and bent down like a great goose, and stared into Levin's eyes.

"I never had sense enough," Levin said, "to guess a riddle, Cy Jeems. Them words I have hearn a good man—my mother's friend—use so often that they scare me. My mind's been a-thinkin' on him night an' day. Oh, is he dead?"

"By smoke! Hokey-pokey! an' Pangymonum, too!" the long, lean, excited fellow whispered, with the greatest solemnity.

"They're Jimmy Phoebus's daily words, dear Cyrus. He was killed on the river night before last; I saw him fall; it is my sin and misery."

"He ain't dead," Cy James whispered, very low and carefully. "I won't tell you whar he is till you make Huldy like me."

"How kin I do that, Cy?"

"She thinks I'm a coward and gits whipped by Owen Daw. Tell her I ain't no coward. Tell her I'm goin' to fry all these people on my griddle—all but Huldy. Tell her I'm only playin' coward till I gets 'em all in batter an' the griddle greased, an' then I'll be the bully of the Cross-roads!"

"Do you hate me, Cy Jeems? I ain't done nothin' to you. I'm a prisoner here till I kin git my boat back from Joe an' go to Prencess Anne."

"I won't hate you if you kin make Huldy love me," Cy James replied. "Tell her I ain't no coward; that I'm goin' to be free, an' rich too." He dropped his palms to his knees again, and whispered, "fur I know whar ole Patty buries her gole an' silver!"

"Come with those horses, you idle lads," the lisping voice of the Captain was heard to call. "Ya, ya! there, luego! the morning passes on."

"All ready," Cy James replied, and as they left the stable door he whispered once again, and looked significantly towards Johnson's Cross-roads:

"By smoke! Hokey-pokey! an' Pangymonum, too!"

The Captain, looking like a gentleman of the knightly ages misplaced in this forest lair, held the reins standing on the ground, and handed Hulda in to the seat beside his own with a grace and a blush and a lisping laugh that, Levin thought, were very fascinating.

"Now, Master Cannon, take your place in the tail of the vehicle," the Captain said, bowing to Levin, and darting one of those cold, coarse looks at him that he vouchsafed but for a moment, like a soft cat that has all the nature of the rabbit except the tiger's glare.

The vehicle was an old wagon without springs, and Levin's seat was a piece of board, while Hulda's had a back to it, and the Captain had padded it with a bear's-skin robe. He looked with the most delicate attention at Hulda, blushed when she looked at him, and, scarcely noticing the horses, yet having them under nearly automatic control, he drove out of Patty Cannon's lane and turned into the woods.

Levin cast one long, prying look at Johnson's tavern, wishing he might have the gift to see through its weather-stained planking and tall blank roof, and then he watched the road, of hard sand or piney litter, with here and there a mud-hole or long, puddly rut in it, unravel like a ribbon behind the wheels among the thick pines.

He also observed the skill with which the Captain threw his long cowhide whip, a mere strip of rawhide fastened to a stick, awkward in other hands; but Van Dorn could brush a fly from either of the short, shaggy Delaware horses with it, and hardly look where he struck or disturb the horse, and he could deliver a blow with it by mere sleight that made the animal stagger and tremble with the abrupt pain.

At a little sandy rill, the only one they crossed, a long water-snake endeavored to escape before the rapid wagon could strike it, but the Captain rose to his feet quick and cat-like, and projected the long lash into the roadside, and the snake writhed and bounded in the air almost cut in two. Then, sitting again and bending so close to Hulda that his long, downy mustache of gold touched her cheek, Van Dorn said, softly:

"Que hermoso! Young wild-flower, let me take a snake out of your path also?"

"Which one, Captain?"

"It does not matter. Name any one."

"Alas!" said Hulda, "I am of them; how can I wish harm to my stepfather and my grand-dame? They are not what I wish, but I am commanded to honor them."

"By whom, fair Hulda?"

"By God. I read it in the Book after I heard it from a slave."

"Donde esta! What slave that we know was so God-read?"

"Poor drunken Dave. He was a good man before he knew us. He told me all the Commandments for a drink of brandy, and I wrote them down and afterwards I found them in a book."

"Chis! chito! how graceful is your mind, Hulda! It comes out of the absolute blank of your condition and discovers things, as the young osprey, untaught before, knows where to dive for fish. Who that ever comes to Johnson's Cross-roads brings the Bible?"

"Colonel McLane."

"He? the self-righteous crocodile! he gave you the Book?"

"Yes. He told me Joe and grandma were good people—'conservative good people,' I think he called it; but he said you believed nothing, and there was no basis, I think he called it, for 'conservative good' in you."

"O hala hala! But this is good," the Captain softly remarked, stroking his golden mustache with the hand that carried the lustrous ring. "Patty Cannon may be saved; I must be damned; and Allan McLane will sit in judgment. No, I believe nothing, because such as they believe!"

"That is why nobody likes you," Hulda frankly observed, "agreeable as you are."

"And can you believe in anything after the surroundings of your childhood, touching crime like the pond-lily that grows among the water-snakes?"

"The lily cannot help it, and is just as white as if it grew under glass, because—"

"Because the lily has none of the blood of the snake?" the captain lisped. "Do you enter that claim?"

"No," said Hulda; "I know I am born from wicked parents, a daughter of crime, my father hanged, my mother of dreadful origin, but never have I felt that God held me accountable for their works if I kept my heart humble and my hands from sin; and never have I been tempted yet from within my own nature to enjoy a single moment of such hideous selfishness. And I thank my kind Maker that something to love and believe in, though unhappy as myself, has come down the sad pathway I looked along so many years, and found me waiting for him."

Without reply, the Captain kept his own thoughts for several minutes, and finally sighed:

"I know one thing in which I might believe, pretty child."

"Oh, then embrace it," Hulda said, "and give your faith a single straw to cling to."

Van Dorn's hand slipped around her waist, and his florid cheeks and blue eyes bent beneath her Leghorn hat:

"I find it here, perhaps, Hulda. Shall I embrace your youth with my strong passion? I fear I love you."

"Yes," she answered, looking up with her long-lashed eyes of such entrancing gray; "kiss me if it will give you hope!"

The blush and high color went out of his face as he stared into those passive, large gray orbs, wide open beneath his pouting, rich, effeminate lips, and, as he hesitated, Hulda repeated:

"Kiss me, if it will make you hope!"

"No, no," he answered; "of all places I am most hopeless there."

"I knew you would not kiss me," Hulda said, with a tone above him, "if I gave you the right for any pure object. The kiss you would give me does not see its mate in my soul."

"You hate me, then?" said Van Dorn.

"No, I pity you; I pray for you, too."

"For me? What interest have you in me?"

"I do not know," said Hulda. "I have often wondered what made me think of you so often and, yet, never with admiration. You are the only person here who appears to have lost something by being here; some portion of you seems to have disappeared; I have felt that you might have been a gentleman, though you can never be again. I shrink from you, and still I pity you. But, with all your handsome ways, I would never love you, while the poor boy who is riding with us I loved as soon as he came."

"Chis! chito! You can shrink from me and not from a Cannon, too? Why, girl, you have put him in my power."

"I have been in your power for a long time, Captain Van Dorn, and you have looked at me with bold and evil eyes many a time, but never came nearer. When I gaze at you as I did just now, you fly from me. That boy I love is as safe as I am, in your hands."

"Why, dear presumer? Tell me."

"Because I love him, and you require my pity. As long as you protect that poor orphan boy I shall carry your name to God for pardon; if you ever do him harm, my prayers for you will be dumb forever."

"Oh! ayme! ayme!" softly laughed Van Dorn, his blush not coming now; "you forget, Hulda, that I believe in nothing."

They had hardly gone four miles when a little, low-pitched town of small square houses, strewn about like toy-blocks between pairs of red outside chimneys, sat, in the soft, humid October morning, along the rim of a marshy creek that, skirting the hamlet, flowed into the Nanticoke River a few miles, by its course, above Twiford's wharf. Two streets, formed by two roads, ended in a third street along the sandy, flattish river shore, and there stood four or five larger dwellings, like their humbler neighbors, built of wood, but with bolder, greater chimneys, rising into the air as if in rivalry of four large ships and brigs that lay at anchor or beside the two wharves, and threw their masts and spars into the sailing clouds, making the low forest that closed river and village in, stoop to its humility. But the beautiful river, with frequent bluffs of sand and woods, flowing two hundred yards wide in stately tide, and bearing up to Cannon's Ferry fish-boats and pungies, Yankee schooners and woodscows, and the signs of life, however lowly, that floated in blue smoke from many hearths, or sounded in oars, rigging, and lading, seemed to Hulda human joy and power, and she cried to Levin:

"Levin, oh, look! Did you ever see as big a place as this? Yonder is the road to Seaford, just as far as we have come! The big ships are taking corn for West Indies, and bringing sugar and molasses. That is the ferry scow, and on the other side it is only five miles to Laurel."

"Do you like to travel that road?" asked the Captain, with his pleasing lisp and blush returned again.

"It makes me sad," replied Hulda; "but I do not mutter when I go past the spot, like grandma."

"What spot?" asked Levin.

"Where father killed the traveller," Hulda said. "He died shamefully for it. You could almost see the place but for yonder woods, where the road to Laurel climbs the sandy hill."

"What's this?" said Van Dorn, seeing a little crowd around one of the single-story cabins, and turning his team into the parallel street.

A very tall, grand-looking man towered above the rest, and seemed unable to stand upright in the low cottage, with his proportions, so that he took his place on the grassy sand without and gave his directions to some one within:

"Levy on the spinning-wheel! Simplify the equation! Stand by your fi. fa.! Don't be chicken-hearted, constable—she's had the equivalent; now she sees the quotient, too."

Van Dorn looked on and saw a spinning-wheel come out of the door, and a little wool in a bag after it. Jacob Cannon put his foot on the wheel and poked his head in the door.

"I see an axe and a coffee-mill there, constable: levy onto 'em with your distringas. Experientia docet stultos! Pass out that pair of shoes!"

A voice of a woman crying was heard, and Van Dorn and Levin both leaped out to look.

Hulda also stepped down and disappeared.

A woman, barely able to stand up, and white as illness and anguish could make her, had staggered to the door to beg that her shoes be given back, and pointed to her naked feet.

"Now she's off the bed, levy on that!" cried the military figure with the long, eloquent face and twinkling eyes; "shove it out the window. Mind your fi. fa. and I'll take care of the quotient."

"Have mercy!" cried the woman; "my child was only born last week."

"Fling out that good chair there, constable. Levy on the green chest! Don't you see a whole quilt or blanket anywhere! Allow neither tret nor suttle when you serve a writ for Isaac and Jacob Cannon!"

"Where shall I lie with my babe?" cried the poor woman, looking around on the naked cabin, where neither bed, nor blanket, nor chair, nor chest, nor spinning-wheel remained.

"Li-vari facias! and fi-eri facias! If there's a mistake a replevin lies, but no mistakes are made by Isaac and Jacob Cannon. Constable, I think I see an iron pot on that crane!"

"It's got meat in it, sir—meat a-bilin'," answered the constable.

"Turn out the meat! Levy on the pot! Make the quotient accurate! Eliminate the pot from the equation!"

Out came the pot, as the material boiling in it put out the October fire, and it was thrown in the miscellaneous heap at Jacob Cannon's feet.

"Now take the cradle, hard-hearted man," the woman cried, "and turn the baby into the fire, too, since I can cook nothing to make its milk in my breasts."

"Is the cradle worth anything, constable?" asked the magnificent-looking man with the gray silvery lights around his horsy nose; "if it's worth taking, I want it. People who can't pay their debts must live single like Jacob Cannon, and not be distrained."

A boy, with his face scratched, and dissipation settled in it, bounded suddenly into the aghast group of spectators, and made a vicious dive to recover the effects around Jacob Cannon's feet, but that mighty worthy took him by the collar and, holding him up, dropped him over a fence like a bug:

"Owen Daw, here be witnesses to an assault insultus, actionable as a trespass vi, the quotient whereof is damages or the equivalent in Georgetown jail. Take heed, good citizens, and especially I note you, Captain Van Dorn."

"I'll kill him," shouted the young bully of Johnson's Cross-roads, and late distrainer on the profile of Cyrus James, Esquire, seizing an ugly stick.

"Justifiable as son assault demesne," remarked the creditor, carelessly, as he wrenched the bobbin from the spinning-wheel and knocked the boy down with it.

His commanding manner and the ready hand operated to abash the latter, and, deeply pained with the scene, Levin Dennis fervently and impulsively cried to Van Dorn:

"Oh, Captain! can't you pay her debts! I'll give all Joe's going to give me, to pay you back. See how she lays on the bare floor! Hear her child crying for her! Oh! I think I hear my mother's voice a-callin' of me home as I listen to it."

Van Dorn, feeling Levin's hands grasp his own with simple confidence, heard and did not turn his head, while blushes like roses bloomed successively upon his fresh, effeminate cheeks. He did not repel the boy's hands, however, but looked at the scene with worldly and unpitying curiosity.

"To pay the distraints of Isaac and Jacob Cannon," he murmured, softly, "would keep a poor slaver poor. You must grow accustomed to such cries: I had to do so. Learn to love money like that merchant and me, and you will think them music."

"Oh, when we cry to God for mercy, captain, maybe our cries will sound like that! I can't bear to hear it."

"You told mother, Jake Cannon, when she rented this ole house," the boy, Owen Daw, exclaimed, "that she needn't pay the rent, if she didn't want to, till the day of judgment."

"I've got the judgment," Jacob Cannon answered, his whitish eyes seeming to chuckle to the bridge of his nose, "and this is the day it's due. All legal days are 'judgment days' to Isaac and Jacob Cannon."

"My son, my son," the woman's voice wailed out to Owen Daw, "I see the end of your going to Patty Cannon's: my baby to the grave, myself to the almshouse, and you to the gallows."

"Captain, Captain," Levin cried, "oh, pay the debt for me! Mother's never been poor as this. Pay it, and I will work fur you anywhair, dear captain."

"How much is the debt," asked Van Dorn, lispingly.

"Ten dollars," spoke the constable, also moved to shame.

"Cannon, will you take me for it?"

"I'll take your judgment-bond or the cash, Captain Van Dorn, nothing less."

"Put back her stuff," the captain said, slightly pressing Levin's hand, as if to say, "This is for you"—"put back her stuff and I'll settle it with Isaac Cannon."

"God bless you!" cried the woman, taking her babe from the cradle and hushing its hunger at her breast; "they call you a wicked man, but blessings on you for all the good you do!"

"Chito! chito!" smiled Van Dorn. "I did it for this foolish boy; I pity none."

Hulda had resorted to the strand, or river street of Cannon's Ferry, where there were two storehouses, and she had borrowed quill and ink, and written a letter addressed to "Mrs. Ellenora Dennis, Princess Anne, Somerset County, Maryland," saying:

"Madam, Levin, your son, is near this place against his will, among dangerous men and in great temptation, but he has found a friend. In one week this friend will try to write again, and, if not heard from, seek Levin Dennis at Johnson's Cross-roads."

This letter, written with all her unproficient speed, had just been folded, wafered, and endorsed, and she had put down one of the shillings of 1815 to pay the postage, when a shadow fell upon the store counter, and the letter was withdrawn from her hand; Van Dorn stood by her side.

"Chis! chito! Es posible? A spy, perhaps. Now you will love Van Dorn, or Grandma Cannon shall hear your letter read!"

"Give it to me, Captain," Hulda pleaded; "she will kill me if she reads it."

"If it were sent, pomarosa, we all might die. No, you are too dangerous."

He looked, without his blush, at the shilling she was putting back in her bosom, and his eye was cold and fierce. Hulda's heart sank down.

"Brother Isaac," cried Jacob Cannon, to a man of fine, lean height, who was at the desk—a man a little shorter than Jacob, and not so much of a king in appearance but with the same whitish eyes dancing around the bridge of his nose, and a more covert and thoughtful brow—"Brother Isaac, Captain Van Dorn is chicken-hearted, and wants to settle the debt of the Widow O'Day, otherwise Daw."

"By cash or judgment-note, captain?"

"Cash," answered Van Dorn, modestly; "take it out of this double-eagle, with Madam Cannon's rent for your farm."

"There's a tree—a bee-tree, Brother Jacob, I think you said—cut down from Mrs. Cannon's field?"

"Yes, actionable under statute made and provided, wilfully to spoil or destroy any timber or other trees, roots, shrubs, or plants; value of said bee-tree three dollars; levari facias! The quotient is unsatisfactory to Isaac and Jacob Cannon."

The eyes of the elder and smaller brother endeavored to have an introduction to each other through the bridge of his nose.

"Oh, Brother Jacob," he chuckled, "what an executive help you air! Captain, isn't he a perfect Marius?"

"Madam Cannon," observed the captain, "throws up the farm with this payment, gentlemen. She has already moved her effects across the line to son-in-law Johnson's. The bee-tree I know nothing about."

"Brother Jacob," spoke Isaac Cannon, "Moore takes the farm! Let him be notified that his rent commences without day."

"Execution made, Brother Isaac," answered the Marius of the family. "This morning, perceiving Patty Cannon about to move her effects, my bailiff seized on her plough as security for the aforesaid bee-tree spoiled, maimed, and destroyed, and Moore is ploughing to put in his wheat with it already. Time is money to Isaac and Jacob Cannon."

"Ha, ha! what an executive comfort! Brother Jacob never adds an item to profit and loss."

"Gentlemen," said Van Dorn, "I recommend you not to be charging bee-trees to tenants in the vicinity of Johnson's Cross-roads. It's an unusual item, and we are raising young men there who may not understand it."

"Captain," said the elder Cannon, chuckling as if still in admiration of Marius's subtlety, "I recollect now that our ferryman brought over a man from Laurel this morning with some news. A woman with a broken shackle reported there last night, and said she was the slave of Daniel Custis of Princess Anne: she came from Broad Creek."

"Where did she go?"

"A Methodist preacher put her in his buggy and started to her master's with her."

"Then she'll beat the wind," said Van Dorn; "these preachers are all horse-jockeys, and can outswap the devil. Hola! ya, ya! I must see to this."

He strode out, with a cold eye glanced at Hulda.

"Come, young people," spoke the grand head of Jacob Cannon to Levin and Hulda; "I will show you my museum."

He led the way to a warehouse overhanging the river and unlocked a door, and told them to walk carefully till they could see in the dark of the interior.

Levin kept Hulda's hand in his as they slowly saw emerge from the shadows a great variety of dissimilar things heaped together, till the house could hardly hold the vast aggregate of pots and kettles, spinning-wheels and cradles, bedsteads and beds, harrows and ploughs, chairs and gridirons, rakes and hoes, silhouettes and picture-frames, hand-made quilts of calico and pillows of home-plucked geese feathers, fishermen's nets and oars—whatever made the substance of living in an old country without minerals and manufactures, in the early part of the nineteenth century.

"Whare did you git' em, sir?" Levin asked.

"Executed of 'em," said the warrior head and stature of Jacob Cannon; "pounced on 'em; satisfied judgments upon 'em. Fi. fa.! We call this Peale's Museum Number Two, or the Variegated Quotient."

"All these things taken from the poor?" asked Hulda. "How many miseries they tell!"

"Mr. Cannon," said Levin, "what kin you do with 'em? People won't buy 'em. They're just a-rottin' to pieces."

"We keep' em to show all them who trespass on Isaac and Jacob Cannon," answered Marius, with easy grandeur, "that there is a judgment-day!"

Hulda's long-lashed gray eyes, with a look of more than childish contempt, accompanied her words:

"I should think you would fear that day, Mr. Cannon, when you say the prayer, 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.'"

The wind from the river seemed to bend the old warehouse, and the noise it made through the chinks and around the corners, slightly stirring the loosely disposed pile of cottage and hut comforts, seemed to arouse low wails among these as when they were torn from the chimney side and the family.

"Where is my baby?" the cradle seemed to say, "that I received and rocked warm from the womb of pain? Oh, I am hungry for his little smile!"

"Why do I rest my busy wheel?" the spinner seemed to creak, "when I know my children are without stockings? Who keeps me here idle while Mother asks for me?"

"Where is the old gray head," sighed the feathers, sifting in the breeze from a broken pillow-case, "that every night and in the afternoons dozed on our bag of down, and picked us over once a year, and said her prayers in us? Oh, is she sleeping on the cold, bare floor, and we so useless!"

The pot seethed to the kettle, "It is dinner-time, and the little boys are crying for food, and still there is no one to lift me on the crane and start the fire beneath me! What will they think of me, they gathered around so many years and watched me boil, and poked their little fingers in to taste the stewing meat? I want to go! I want to go!"

The kettle answered to the pot: "I never sung since the constable forced me from grandmother's hand, and robbed her of the cup of tea."

The old quilt of many squares fluttered in the draught: "Take me to the young wife who sewed me together and showed me so proudly, for I fear she is a-cold since her young husband died!"

These household sounds the thrilled young lovers, standing so poor and on the brink of what they knew not, seemed to hear in awe, and drew closer to each other, like young Eve and Adam in the great wreck of Paradise and at the voice of God.

Hand in hand they stepped forth into the bright light of day, and walked along the sandy street beneath the tall locust, maple, and ailanthus trees that grew in line along the front yards of the Cannon brothers. Four large houses stood sidewise, end to end, here: first, Cannon's business house; next, Isaac Cannon's comfortable home, where he dwelt, a married man; and, third, the elegant frame mansion, with tall, airy chimneys, of Jacob Cannon the bachelor, whose house, built for a bride, had never yet been warmed by a fire; finally, the old, bow-roofed, low dwelling of the mother of the Cannons, opposite which was the ferry wharf, and Van Dorn talking to the negro ferryman.

"Levin," said pretty Hulda, not sad, but very grave, "this noble house is like that noble-looking Mr. Cannon, hollow and cold. He lives with his brother Isaac, and keeps his own dwelling empty and locked up, because he loved money too much to find a wife."

"Let us love each other, Huldy," Levin said; "it is all we've got."

"It is all there is to get, my love," Hulda answered. "Yes, I do love you, Levin. I will try to save you, if I can, because I love you, though suffering may come to me."

"No," cried Levin, "I cannot leave you, dear. If I could now cross in the ferry-boat, I wouldn't do it; I must go back with you."

As Captain Van Dorn came up from the wharf, blushing like a school-boy, and tapping his white teeth together under the long flax of his mustache, his attention was arrested by a proclamation pasted on a post:

"Five Hundred Dollars Reward, for

JOSEPH MOORE JOHNSON, KIDNAPPER.

"The above reward will be paid by me to any person or persons—and they will be exempted from detention—who will deliver to me the body of the above-named miscreant, that he may be brought to trial in Pennsylvania.

"JOSEPH WATSON, Mayor of Philadelphia."

"Chis! he!" Van Dorn sighed; "the end must soon be near. Now, young people, come!"

As they passed Cannon's place, going out of town, the familiar voice of Jacob was heard to cry:

"Owen Daw's escaped, Brother Isaac; but we'll clap it to him on a de bonis non. I'll never take my eye off him till I die."

"Brother Jacob, what an executive help you air!"

As Van Dorn drove the horses up the slight ascent in the rear of the ferry, past an ancient double puncheon house there, with an arch in the centre, young Hulda—who now wore shoes and stockings, and a presentable dress of English goods, and looked quite the woman out of her sincere and sometimes proud and eloquent eyes—said to him, as she pointed back:

"Captain, it was there my father killed the traveller, where we see the road beyond the ferry enter the pines."

"Yes," said Van Dorn, giving her a cold look; "we might see the place but for the woods. It is at a hill, a short mile from the Nanticoke."

"Tell Levin about it, captain."

"Quedo, quedo! It would not be pleasant."

"Yes," said Hulda; "if it was true, I can hear it: I want Levin to hear it, too, so that no deceit shall be between us."

Her smooth, moist hair, gray, humid eyes, complexion born between the rose and dew, and straight, lithe figure, and air of dignity and truth, impressed Van Dorn curiously:

"How bold you grow, wild-flower! Cannot you stoop to re-create me? I, too, would live without deceit. But I will not tell you that story."

"You are afraid," spoke Hulda, feeling that nothing but this man and three miles of level road separated her from the vengeance of Patty Cannon, and that she must assert herself strongly over him.

"Ya, ya! Are you not harsh? Remember, you may be whipped by your grandma."

"No, you will whip me, or kill me, if it is to be done. You dare not give me to her to punish."

"Dare not, again? Why?"

"Because you are my guardian. Between us is an instinct different from love, but strong; I feel it. I lean towards you, but not on you. What is it?"

"O Dios!" lisped Van Dorn, his blush suspended and his warm blue eyes fascinated by her. "Is this a child or Echo?"

"Tell me of my father's crime. I want Levin to know the wretched thing he has affection for."

"Ayme! ah! Well, listen, young lovers; and see what grisly things walk in these pines! There was a man named Brereton; they call him Bruington here, where their noses are twisted and their chins weak. He came from old Lewes, off to the east by Cape Henlopen, and of a stout family, in which was a grain of evil ever smoking through the blood. Do you sometimes feel it, Hulda?"

"No, not evil like that."

"He was apprenticed to a blacksmith, and held the iron while the master struck. One day a man came in the shop, whose horse had thrown a shoe, to have a shoeing, and, when he paid for it, he took a handful of money from his pocket, and one piece—a dollar—fell in the soft soot of the shop, unperceived but by the boy: chis! he covered it with his foot."

Van Dorn's whip-lash firmly covered a huge fly on the horse's ear, and laid it dead.

"When the man departed, the boy raised his foot and uncovered the dollar; his master said, 'Smart boy!' They divided the stolen dollar."

"Jimmy Phoebus says the fust step is half of a journey," Levin noted.

"The blacksmith's boy looked avariciously on travellers ever after, who might possess a dollar. He took the empty shop of Patty Cannon's first husband, years after that saint died, and worked on hobbles, clevises, and chains to hold the kidnapped articles of commerce. Naturally he kidnapped, too, and, while she was yet a child, Patty's daughter became Brereton's wife, bestowed by the fond, appreciative mother. Master Levin, if you fall into his path, Brereton's daughter may be bestowed on you. Hola! behold her in Hulda."

"I can't see any of that sin in Hulda, Captain; she ain't even ashamed."

"No," affirmed Hulda, looking sincerely at Van Dorn; "it is too true to make me ashamed. I feel as if God's hand covered me like the silver dollar under my father's foot, because he let me survive such parents."

As she spoke she took one of the silver shillings of 1815 and covered it with her hand in Van Dorn's sight. Van Dorn spoke on rapidly:

"There were two brothers named Griffin from about Cambridge, in Maryland; spoiled boys who had taken to the flesh trade, and they stole men and gambled the proceeds away, and Brereton was their leader. One day a traveller came by from Carolina, hunting contraband slaves, and he was of your boastful sort, and dropped the hint that he had fifteen thousand dollars on his body to be invested. No later had he spoken than he felt his folly, from the burning eyes around him and watering mouths telling him to sleep there and slaves would be fetched; so he started in a fright for Laurel, by way of Cannon's Ferry, intending to deposit his money or make them deal with him there. The word was passed to Brereton by his wife or mother-in-law, and by Brereton to the Griffins, to mount and intercept the gold. Some say," lisped Van Dorn, "that Mistress Cannon, dressed in man's clothes, commanded the band."

A deep, chuckling interest, like the sound of a hidden brook, attended Van Dorn's recital, and he was blushing like a girl.

"At Slabtown, a nondescript spot a mile above Cannon's, the light-marching band crossed in a row-boat; they piled brush and bent down saplings in the traveller's road, where he should almost reach the brow of the hill in his buggy, and when the fleshmonger halted at the obstacle, chis, hola! they let him have it on both sides, and sent icicles to his heart. He drew a pistol, but in a dying hand. 'Away!' cried the assassins; 'he is not dead.' His horse, in fright at bursting firearms in the evening shades, leaped the brushy barriers and galloped to Laurel, and delivered there an ashy-visaged effigy, down whose beard the red dye of his life dripped audibly, as he sat stiff in death in the buggy. His name was only guessed; how happy he in that!"

"And what was the fate of the murderers?" Hulda asked, with less horror than Levin showed.

"Three of them were arrested; one of the Griffins exposed his brother and Captain Brereton; these two died on the gallows at Georgetown, young Brereton exerting himself under the noose to prevent his injudicious comrade saying too much on peerless Patty Cannon and her fair sisters, and thinking on their interests more than on this living child. Ha! Hulda Brereton?"

"The other Griffin also suffered death?" suggested Hulda, with a pale, unevasive countenance.

"Yes, your fond grandma, then in her blazing charms, drew him to her band again with the lure of Widow Brereton's hand; he killed a constable to recommend himself the better, and died on the gallows at his native Cambridge. Hala hala! she gave your mother, wild-flower Hulda, to Joe Johnson next to wife."

"It is an awful story," Levin said, "but Hulda never saw it."

"I can remember my father," said Hulda; "a large, strong man, with a slow, heavy face, but he never smiled on me."

"Well, here is the cross-roads," said Van Dorn. "What shall I do with this letter, bad wild-flower?"

"Read it, if you will, or take this English shilling and post it."

Van Dorn shrank back, rejecting the money.

"Will you not buy it back, Hulda," he whispered, "with love?"

"Never."

"You may pay for this letter this night with your life or modesty!"

"You dare not kill me," Hulda said.

"You will see," said Van Dorn.



CHAPTER XXVIII.

PACIFICATION.

Princess Anne had missed for several days some conspicuous citizens, such as Daniel Custis and wife, Captain Phoebus, Levin Dennis, and the free negro Samson—large components of a small town; but it had also gained what everybody admitted to be the most beautiful woman in the place except Mrs. Vesta Milburn—the brown-eyed, tall, roguish niece of Meshach Milburn, whom Vesta had made a lady of in externals, corrected some of her faults, such as the sniffle, and was daily teaching her the mysteries of grammar and address, aided by the rector of the parish, whose heart was roused to partial animation again by the young visitor.

Loyally William Tilghman had pressed his friendship on Vesta's semi-social husband, determined to like him, and finding small resistance there, and, happily, no suspicion; and this was so grateful to Vesta that she indulged the hope that her cousin and late lover would find compensation for her loss in Rhoda Holland.

Love came easily on as a topic of talk where Rhoda, with her unconventional preference for that subject, introduced it.

"Mr. William"—she had got that far towards the inevitable "William"—said Rhoda, one evening at Teackle Hall, as they sat in the library, "do preachers love jus' like other folks? Misc Somers say they is drea'fle sly-boots. She say thar was a preacher down yer to Girdle Tree Hill that preached the Meal-an-the-Yum was a-goin' to happen right off."

"Millennium," suggested Tilghman.

"Maybe so. Misc Somers call it 'the Meal-an-the-Yum,' I thought. Anyway, they was all goin' to rise, right off, an' he with 'em. Lord sakes! they had frills put on thar night-gowns to rise in. An' the night before they was a-goin' up, that ar scamp run away with a widder an' her darter, jilted the widder an' married the darter; an' they couldn't rise at Girdle Tree Hill caze the preacher wa'n't thar, an' they didn't know when."

"And I suppose Mrs. Somers tells it on him?" William Tilghman added.

"That she do. Now, was you ever in love, Mr. William?"

"I have been thinking, Rhoda, that when you are a good scholar, and grandmother and you grow to like each other, as I believe you will, I might fall in love with you."

"Lord sakes! Me loved by a preacher? Couldn't I never stay home from the preachin'? But then, to hear your own ole man a-barkin' away at the other gals, I think it would be right good!"

The subject had now gone to that length that in a few days, to Grandmother Tilghman's slight indignation, Rhoda called the rector "William," and he answered her, "Dear Rhoda."

The triple widow, however, had one lane to her consideration, up which the artful Rhoda strayed as soon as she saw the gate ajar.

"Misc Tilghman," she said one day, "I been a-lookin' at you. I 'spect you was a real beauty. If you wasn't a little quar, nobody would see you was a ole woman now."

"I was a belle," spoke the blind old lady, emphatically. "General John Eager Howard said he would rather talk with me than hear an oration from Fisher Ames. Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, proposed to me when I was old enough to be your grandmother, and after Susan Decatur, the commodore's widow, had tried in vain to get an offer from him. Said I, 'Carroll, is this another Declaration of Independence? No,' said I, 'Carroll, I won't reduce the last signer, it may be, to obedience on a wife going blind. That would be worse slavery than George the Third's!' He said I was a Spartan widow."

"Every widow I ever see was a sparkin' widow," Rhoda naively concluded, at which Mrs. Tilghman had to join in the laughter, and there was no evil feeling.

Jack Wonnell now held the temporary post of cook and woodchopper at Teackle Hall, and Roxy saw him every day, sewed his tattered clothing up, put the germs of self-respect in him, and caused Vesta to say to her husband, as they were sitting in his storehouse parlor one afternoon, in the intermission of his chill and sweat:

"Such rapid changes have taken place here, Mr. Milburn, that they have disturbed my judgment, and now I hardly know whether my oldest prejudice is assured, as I see that white man the happy domestic servant of my pure slave girl. She seems to have no greater affection than pity and interest for him, while he is made more of a man by his undisguised devotion to her. No man could work better than he does now."

"Love is so great, so occult," the husband said, his brown eyes searching his wife's face over, "that its combinations have centuries left to run before they shall beat every prejudice down, and prove, in spite of sin and dispersion, that of one blood are all the nations made."[4]



CHAPTER XXIX.

BEGINNING OF THE RAID.

The raid into Delaware was all organized when Levin and Hulda were driven to Johnson's tavern, and the arrival of Van Dorn called forth cheers and yells, as that blushing worthy threw his trim, athletic figure out of the wagon and bowed to Joe Johnson, on the tavern porch:

"O hala hala! do you go, son-in-law?"

"I'll ride with ye, Captain, a split of the Maryland way, but sprat for that Delaware! I'll go in it no more. I'll stand whack with you, however, fur the madges I give you and fur my stalling ken."

"Quedito!" lisped Van Dorn; "we never leave your interests out, son-in-law. How is Aunt Patty?"

"She's made a punch fur the population, an' calls fur young Levin thar to lush with her."

"I'll take mine along," Levin cried, "an' drink it in the chill o' the night."

"No," commanded the voice of Patty Cannon; "it's a-waitin' fur you, son: a good stiff bowl of apple and sugar. Him as misses his drinks yer we sets no account on."

As Van Dorn and Levin pushed through the motley crowd on the little porch into the bar, where Mrs. Cannon administered, she set before them two fiery bowls, and cried:

"Come in yer, Colonel McLane, an' jine my nug an' my young cousin Levin."

"No, Patty," answered a voice from the next room within; "I've drunk my share. There's nothing like a conservative course."

As Patty put her head into this inner room, Levin Dennis, seeing a window open at his elbow, threw the whole of his liquor over his shoulder into the yard and smacked his lips heartily, saying,

"Good!"

"Ha!" exclaimed Van Dorn, evidently noticing Levin's deceit; "smart people are around us, Patty. Beware!"

He took from his pocket the fateful letter and glanced at its endorsement, and, as he did so, Levin heard an exclamation in the yard from a man who had received the whole of the apple brandy and sugar in his face, and was furious; but as soon as he seemed to recognize the thrower he muttered, apologetically:

"Hokey-pokey! By smoke! and Pangymonum, too!"

When Levin looked at Van Dorn again, the blush was on his face, but the letter had disappeared.

"Beware of the conservative course, Colonel," lisped Van Dorn, "except when generous Patty makes the punch; for she holds such measure of it that she does not see our infirmities."

"Honey," cried Patty Cannon to Levin, giving him an affectionate hug, "have ye swallered yer liquor so smart as that? Why, I love to see a nice boy drink."

"But no more for him now, cajela," the Captain protested; "two such will make him fall off his horse. Bebamos, Patty! Esta excelente!"—drinking.

"How purty the Captain says them things," the madam cried to the gentleman within. "Maybe he's a mockin' his ole sweetheart. Oh, Van Dorn, if I thought you could forget me I would kill you!"

Levin noticed the rapid temper and demoniac face of this not unengaging lady as she spoke, her whole nature turning its course like a wheeling bat, and from plausibility to an instant's jealousy, and then to a dark tide of awful rage, took but a thought.

"Que disparate! hala o he!" Van Dorn lisped, sweetly, chucking the hostess under the chin; "but I do love to see thee so, thou charmer of my life. Never will I desert thee, Patty, whilst thou can suffer."

Her dark clouds slowly passed away as Levin turned from the place, but her small head and abundant raven hair showed the blood troubled to the roots, and the eyes, once rich with midnight depths, now glazing in the course of time, like old window panes, by age, searched the bandit's face with a strange fear:

"Van Dorn, time and pleasure cannot kill you: how well you look to-day. I think you are a boy, to be ruined again every time you love me, you blush so modestly. Where is that pot of color you paint your cheeks with even before me, whose blushes none can recollect? Why do you love me?"

"O dios!" said Van Dorn; "I love thee for these spells of splendor, dark night and noonday passion, the alternations of earth and hell that eclipse heaven altogether. I love to see thee fear, though fearing nothing here, because I see nothing that you fear beyond the grave. You hate this boy?"

"I hate him worse than wrinkles. Let him not come to me a child to-morrow; let him see ghosts long as he lives."

"How are the prisoners, Patty?"

"Why, the white nigger, dovey, is sick to-day; blood-loss and blisters have give him fever. My nigger, that I tied—ha! ha! a good job for Patty Cannon, at her age!—says t'other's a pore coaster named Jimmy Phoebus."

"Joe must be ready for a quick departure," the Captain exclaimed, "when we come back from Dover: it is a bold undertaking, and the whole of the little state will be aroused like a black snake uncoiling in one's pocket."

The woman pointed from her shoulder towards the inner room, and spoke even lower than before:

"Van Dorn, I have a customer."

"For negroes?"

"No, for Huldy. He shall have her."

* * * * *

As Levin Dennis stood at the cross-roads without, he saw a strange man ploughing in the farm so recently deserted by his hostess for the gayer cross-roads. The afternoon light fell on the sandy fields and struck a polish from the ploughshare, and, as the ploughman passed the brambly spot again, the buzzards slowly circled up, as if to protest that he came too near their young.

The long, lean servant, who had waited on the breakfast-table, came out to Levin and watched his eyes.

"Ploughin', ploughin'," he said. "Levin, I kin show you how to plough: I can't do it, but you're the man."

"Cyrus, Huldy don't hate you. She says you're the nighest to a friend she's got."

"Oh, I love her like sugar-cane," the lean, cymlin-headed servant said. "Tell her I'm goin' to be a great man. I'm goin' to spile the game. They lick me, but Cy Jeems has courage, Levin."

"Cyrus, tell Huldy all that's goin' on agin her. We don't know nothin'. You kin go and come an' nobody watches you. Huldy will be grateful fur it."

Putting his long arms on his knees and bending down, the scullion stared close to Levin's eyes and whispered, looking towards the field:

"Ploughin'! ploughin'!"

Then, turning partly, and gazing over the old tavern with a look of wisdom, Cy James whispered again:

"Hokey-pokey! By smoke! an' Pangymonum, too!"

"I reckon he's crazy," Levin thought, as the queer fellow turned and fled.

It was about three o'clock when the cavalcade was reviewed by Captain Van Dorn from the porch of the hotel, and it consisted of about twenty persons, white and black; some riding mules, some horses, and there was one wagon in the line—the same that had been driven to Cannon's Ferry—intended for Levin, Joe Johnson, and the Captain. Van Dorn stood blushing, pulling his long mustache of flax, and resting on his cowhide whip.

"Dave," he called to a powerful negro, "get down from that mule; you're too drunk to go. Jump up in his place, Owen Daw!"

The widow's son gladly vaulted on the animal.

"Sorden," continued Van Dorn, "you know all the roads: lead the way! Whitecar, go with him! We rendezvous at Punch Hall at eight o'clock. The order of march is in pairs, a quarter to half a mile apart. If any man acts in anything without orders, or halloos upon the road, he may get this lash or he may get my knife."

"Captain, where do we feed?" asked a small, wiry mulatto.

"Water at Federalsburg," answered Van Dorn; "feed at the Punch Hall."

They rode off in pairs at intervals of ten minutes; Van Dorn's vehicle went last. A moment before he departed, Cy James touched the Captain's sleeve and whispered, "Huldy." Turning to see if he was unobserved, Van Dorn followed to the deep-arched chimney at the northern gable, and dismissed his guide with a look.

"Captain Van Dorn," Hulda said, her large gray eyes strained in tenderness and nervous courage, "do that boy Levin no harm: I love him! God forgive all your sins, many as they are, if you disobey grandmother's wicked commands about my darling!"

"Ha! wild-flower, you have been listening?"

"No, I have only looked: I know Aunt Patty's petting ways when she means to ruin, and watch her black flashes of cunning between: she is no cousin of Levin; he is Joe's gentle prisoner; his very name she made him hide when she saw you coming this morning."

"Creo que si: Hulda, let me kiss you!"

"Yes, if you dare."

She gave him that pure, soul-driven, child's strong look again, exerting all the influence she had ever felt she exercised over him.

Nevertheless he kissed her for the first time:

"To-day, bonito, I dare to kiss thee. Believe me, my kiss is a tender one."

"Yes, sir. There is something like a father in it. Oh, my father, art thou in heaven?"

"If there be such a place, wild-flower, I think he is."

"Oh, thank you, Captain Van Dorn. There may you also be and find the faith I feel in my one day's love on earth. I pray for you every day."

"Ayme, poor weakling! Pray now for thyself: if thou canst save thyself sinless a brief day or two, it may be well for thee and Levin. Thy grandmother is dreadful in her joys this night."

"I can die," said Hulda, "if Levin be saved."

He kissed her again, and something wet dropped down his blushes.

"Eternal love!" he sighed; "I've lost it."



CHAPTER XXX.

AFRICA.

The Captain took his place at the reins, his picturesque velvet jacket, wide hat, bright hair, and gay shirt, thighings, belt, and boots, deserving all Patty Cannon's encomiums as he made a polite adieu and threw his whip like a thunderbolt, and a cheer rose from the discarded volunteers loitering about the tavern as he drove Joe Johnson and Levin away.

The road was nearly dead level for five miles, but, being the old travelled road from Laurel and the south to Easton, and pointing towards Baltimore, numerous farms and clearings were seen, and tobacco-fields alternated with the dry corn and new-ploughed wheat patches. Here and there, like a measure of gold poured upon the ground, the yellow ears lay in the gaunt corn-rows, to become the ground meal of the slave and the cattle's winter substance. Joe Johnson's popularity was everywhere apparent, and many a shout was given of, "Good luck to ye, Joe!" "Tote us a nigger back from Delaway, Joe!" "Don't be too hard on them ar black Blue Hen's chickens, Joe!"

Van Dorn was too far above the comprehension of his neighbors, or, indeed, of anybody, to be familiarly addressed, but "Patty Cannon's man" was the term of injured inferiority towards him after he had passed.

At Federalsburg they crossed the branch of the Nanticoke piercing to the centre of Delaware state, and saw one large brick house of colonial appearance dominating the little wooden hamlet, and here, as generally within the Maryland line, hunting negroes was the "lark" or the serious occupation of many an idle or enterprising fellow, who trained his negro scouts like a setter, or more often like a spaniel, and crossed the line on appointed nights as ardently and warily as the white trader in Africa takes to the trails of the interior for human prey.

"Joe," said Van Dorn, "what is to be your disposition of the prisoners we have?"

"All goes with me to Norfolk but one,—the nigger boxer; I burn him alive on Twiford's island. If the white chap is too pickle to sell, I'll throw him overboard; he ain't safe."

"Ea! sus! it is boyish to burn the old lad. I have had many a blow from a black, and stab, too. A dog will bite you if you lasso him."

"No nigger can knock me down and git off with selling."

"Then you are a bad trader. The negro's price is all the negro is; why make him your equal by hating him?"

"I am a Delaware boy," Joe Johnson said, "and it's the pride with me to give no nigger a chance. In Maryland you pets 'em, like ole Colonel Ned Lloyd over yer on the Wye; he's give his nigger coachman a gole watch an' chain because he's his son! What a nimenog! Some day he'll raise a nigger that'll be makin' politikle speeches, an' then I don't want to live no more."[5]

"Chito! Since the Delaware lawyer sent you to the post, son-in-law, you're morose. I have had to eat with negro princes, dance with their queens, and be ceremonious as if they had been angels."

"It would be the reign of Queen Dick for me! I couldn't do it, nohow."

"And, by the way, Joseph, I may see your friend, the lawyer Clayton, at Dover, to-night: he may send me to the post, too; and I fear no Delaware governor will take off the cropping of my ears, as was done for you in state patriotism."

"Beware of that imp of Tolobon!" Joe Johnson muttered. "How I wish you could kill him, Van Dorn. He's got to be a senator; some day he'll be chief-justice of Delaware: then, what'll niggers be wuth thar?"

"I fancy, Joseph, you might be a legislator in Delaware if your inclinations ran that way?"

"Easy enough, but I makes legislators. My wife, Margaretta—her first husband's sister is the wife of the chancellor."

"Hola! oh! How came that great alliance?"

"She was housekeeper; he was a close old bachelor and must break a leg. 'Well,' she says, 'you're a daddy; justice is your trade, and I must have it.' So, from bein' his peculiar, she becomes the madam; but she inwented the kid."

"I have never been in Dover; how shall I tell where Lawyer Clayton dwells?"

"It's on the green a-middle of the town, a-standin' by the state-house—a long, roughcast house in the corner, three stories high, with two doors; the door next the state-house is his office. Go past the state-house, which has a cupelo onto it, an' you see the jug an' whippin'-post. He's got 'em handy fur you."

Levin listened with all his ears. The liquor was now well out of his system, and he thanked God he had refused Patty Cannon's burning dram, else he might be this night—he thought it with remorse—the reckless mate for Owen Daw, whose own mother had predicted the gallows for him.

"And now, Van Dorn, I turn back," Joe Johnson said; "I have a job to do down the Peninsuly. McLane has become the owner of a gal thar, an' wants her sneaked. I takes black Dave with me, an' when I'm back, my boat will be ready an' my cargo packed. Then hey fur Floridey!"

He unhaltered his horse at the tail of the wagon, mounted him, and rode back across the stream. Van Dorn touched his horses and entered the dense woods in a byway to the north.

"Get up here, Master Levin, and ride by me," the Captain said, very soon, and he lifted Levin's old hat from his head and looked at his bright hair parted in the middle, his fine, large eyes, needing the light of knowledge, and his soft complexion and marks of good extraction.

"Where is thy father, Levin, to let thee go so ragged, with such graceful limbs and feet as these?"

"Shipwrecked," said Levin; "gone down, I 'spect, on the privateer."

"A sailor, was he? Well, he should be home to clothe thee and see that thou dost not cheat. I marked how Madam Cannon's punch was tossed out of the window."

"I thought you would not want me drunk beside you all night, sir, and then I might enjoy your company. I don't want to drink no more liquor."

"You like my company?"

"Yes, sir."

The Captain blushed, and asked,

"Why do you like me?"

"Not fur nothin' you do, sir. I like you fur somethin' in your ways; I reckon you're a smart man."

"Si, senor, that I am. I have gained the whole world and lost two."

"Two worlds, sir?"

"Yes, two immortal worlds; that is to say, two unaccountable worlds. I am no Christian."

"Maybe you're Chinee or Mahometan, then, sir; I 'spect everybody's got a religion."

"I was a Mahometan for business ends," Van Dorn said. "Having become a slaver, it was nothing to be a renegade. Stealing a man's soul every day, I put no value on mine. Yes, Mahomet is the prophet of God: so are you."

"You have been in Afrikey, I 'spect," suggested Levin.

"A few years only, but long enough to be rich and to be ruined. I know the negro coast from the Gambia to Cape Palmas, and inland to Timbo. I have had an African queen and the African fever: I went to conquer Africa and became a slave."

"In Africa, I 'spect, Captain," Levin remarked, without inference, "a nigger-trader is respectable."

Van Dorn shook his head.

"I doubt if that trade is respectable anywhere on this globe, unless it be here. No, I will say for these people, too, that while they do it low lip homage, they look down on it. I was once the greatest guest in Timbo, housed with its absolute prince, attended by my suite, looking like an ambassador, and he called me 'his son' and drew me to his breast. Proclamations were made that I should be respected as such, yet every human object fled before me. As I rode out alone to see the gardens and cassava fields, the roaming goats and oxen, and the rich mountain prospects, and saw the sloe-eyed girls bathing in the brooks, the cry went round, 'Flesh-buyer is coming,' and huts were deserted, fields forsaken, the gray patriarchs and the little children ran, and I was left alone with the dumb animals, despised, abhorred."

"Don't they have slavery thair, sir?"

"Yes, slavery immemorial, yet the slave-buyer is no more respectable than the procurer. The coin of Africa, its only medium, was the slave. He paid the debt of war, of luxury, and of business. Yet the soul of man, in the familiar study of such universal slavery, grovels with it, and points to bright destiny no more with the head erect: I died in Africa."

"Ain't you in the business now, sir?"

"Now I am a mere forest thief and bushman, Levin. He who begins a base trade rises early to its fulness, and in subsequent life must be a poor wolf rejected from the pack, stealing where he can sneak in. Such is the kidnapper eking out the decayed days of the slaver; such is the ruined voluptuary, living at last on the earnings of some shameless woman; such am I: behold me!"

Van Dorn's eyes turned on Levin in their cold, heartless light, and yet he blushed, as usual.

"You ought to be a gentleman, Captain. What made you break the laws so and be a bad man?"

"Ayme! ayme!" mused Van Dorn, "shall I tell you? It was Africa. I was a high-minded youth, cool and bold, and with a thread of pleasure in me. I went to sea in a manly trade, and, fortune being slow, they whispered to me, in the West Indies, that my clipper was just the thing for the slave-trade, and I made the first venture out of virtue, which is all the voyage. In Africa I fell a prey to the voluptuous life a white man leads there, to which the very missionaries are not always exceptions. Young, pale, gentle, graceful, brave, my blushes instant as my passions, the ceaseless intrigue of that hot climate circled around me like a dance in the harem around the young intruder: I forgot my native land and every obligation in it; I was enslaved by Africa to its swooning joys; I went there like the serpent and was stung by the woman."

"Ain't they all right black and ugly in Africa, Captain?"

"The world has not the equals of Senegambia for beauty," said Van Dorn. "The Fullah beauties are often almost white, and the black admixture is no more than varnish on the maple-tree. And even here, my lad, where civilization builds a wall of social fire around the slave, you often mark the idolatry of the white head to captive Africa."

"Did you make money?"

"For some years I did, plenty of it; but degradation in the midst of pleasure weighed down my spirits. The thing called honor had flown from over me like the heavenly dove, and in its place a hundred painted birds flocked joyfully, the dazzling creatures of that thoughtless world. Oh, that I could have been born there or never have seen it! At last I started home, but the world had adopted a new commandment, 'Thou shalt not trade in man.' They took my ship and all its black cargo, and I came home naked. Then my heart was broke, and I turned kidnapper."

"Home is the best place," said Levin; "I 'spect it is, even if folks is pore. When Jimmy Phoebus give me a boat I thought I was rich as a Jew."

"What is that name?" asked Van Dorn.

"James Phoebus: he's mother's sweetheart."

"Ce ce ce!" the Captain mused; "your mother lives, then?"

"Yes, sir. She's pore, but Jimmy loves her, and the ghost of father feeds her."

"Quedo! a ghost? what kind of thing is that? Aunt Patty sees them: I never do."

"It comes an' puts sugar an' coffee in the window, an' sometimes a pair of shoes an' a dress. Mother says it's father: I guess it is."

"O Dios!" lisped Van Dorn. "This Phoebus, is he a good man?"

"Brave as a lion, sir; pore as any pungy captain; the best friend I ever had. I hoped mother would marry him, he's been a-waitin' fur her so long. She's afraid father ain't dead."

"O hala, hala! women are such waiters; but this man can wait too. Is he strong?"

"He come mighty nigh givin' Joe Johnson a lickin' last Sunday, sir, in Princess Anne. He hates a nigger-trader. Him an' Samson Hat, a black feller, thinks as much of each other as two brothers."

"And he gave you a boat?"

"Yes, sir: Joe Johnson hired it of me, but I didn't know he was goin' to run away niggers. He's got my boat an' ruined my credit, I 'spect, in Princess Anne, an' what will mother do when I go to jail?"

"Why, this other man, Phoebus, is there to marry her or look after her."

"Oh, Captain," sobbed Levin, putting his hands on Van Dorn's knees, and laying his orphan head there too, "pore Jimmy's dead: Joe Johnson shot him."

The Captain did not move or speak.

"I've been a drunkard, Captain," Levin sobbed again, in the confidence of a child; "that's whair all our misery comes from. I've got nothin' but my boat, an' people hires it to go gunnin' an' fishin' and spreein', and they takes liquor with 'em, an' I drinks. God help me; I never will agin, but die first!"

"Are you not afraid to lean on me?" lisped Van Dorn.

"No, sir."

"I have killed people, too."

"The Lord forgive you, sir; I know you won't kill me."

A sigh broke from the bandit's lips, in place of his usual soft lisp, and was followed by a warm drop of water, as from the forest leaves now bathed in night, that plashed on Levin's neck.

"O God," a soft voice said, "may I not die?"

Then Levin felt the same warm drops fall many times upon him, and his nature opened like the plants to rain.

"I have found a friend, Captain," the boy spoke, after several minutes, but not looking up; "I feel you cry."

"Chito! chito!" lisped Van Dorn; "here is Punch Hall."

Levin raised his head, and saw nothing but an old house standing in the trees, with a little faint light streaming from the door, and heard the low hilarity of drinking men. The whole band poured out to receive Van Dorn's commands.

"One hour here to feed and rest!" Van Dorn exclaimed. "Let those sleep who can. Let any straggle or riot who dare!"



CHAPTER XXXI.

PEACH BLUSH.

Judge Custis, whom we left riding out of Princess Anne on Sunday afternoon, kept straight north, crossed the bottom of Delaware in the early evening, and went to bed at Laurel, on Broad Creek, a few miles south of Cannon's Ferry.

At daylight he was ahorse again, scarcely stiff from his exertion, and feeling the rising joys of a stomach and brain becoming clearer than for years, of all the forms of alcohol. His mind had been bathed in sleep and temperance, the two great physicians, and wiped dry, like the feet of the Prince of sufferers, with women's hairs. Exercise, natural to a Virginian, awakened his flowing spirits again, and he fancied the air grew purer as he advanced into the north, though there was hardly any perceptible change of elevation. The country grew drier, however, as he turned the head springs of the great cypress swamp—the counterbalance of the Dismal Swamp of Virginia—receded from the Chesapeake waters, and approached the tributaries of the Atlantic. At nine o'clock he entered the court-house cluster of Georgetown, a little place of a few hundred people, pitched nearly at the centre of the county one generation before, or about ten years after the independence of the country.

It was a level place of shingle-boarded houses, assembled around a sandy square, in which were both elm and Italian poplar trees; and a double-storied wooden court-house was on the farther side, surrounded by little cabins for the county officers, pitched here and there, and in the rear was a jail of two stories, with family apartments below, and the dungeon window, the debtors' room, and a family bedroom above; and near the jail and court-house stood the whipping-post, like a dismantled pump, with a pillory floor some feet above the ground.

Young maples, mulberry and tulip trees, and ailanthuses grew bravely to make shade along the two streets which pierced the square, and the four streets which were parallel to its sides—pretty lanes being inserted between, to which the loamy gardens ran; and, as the Judge stopped at the tavern near the court, he was told it was "returning day," and the place would soon be filled with constituents assembling to hear how "she'd gone"—she, as the Judge knew well, meaning Sussex County, and "gone" intimating her decision expressed at the polls.

"She's gone for Adams an' Clayton, ain't she, Jonathan Torbert?" asked the innkeeper.

"Yes," spoke a plain, religious-looking man, the teller of the bank; "Johnny Clayton's kept Sussex and Kent in line for Adams; Jeems Bayard and the McLanes have captured Newcastle: Clayton goes to the senate, Louis McLane to the cabinet, the country to the alligators."

"Hurrah for Jackson!" answered the host; "he suits me ever since he whipped the British."

At breakfast Judge Custis recognized a gentleman opposite, wearing smallclothes, and with his hair in a queue, who spoke without other than a passively kind expression:

"Judge."

"Ah! Chancellor!"

The Chancellor was nearly seventy years old, wearing an humble, meditative, yet gracious look, as one whose relations to this world were those of stewardship, and whose nearly obsolete dress was the badge, not of worldly pride, but of perished joys and contemporaries. His unaffected countenance seemed to say: "I wear it because it is useless to put off what no one else will wear, when presently I shall need nothing but a shroud."