The Entailed Hat Part 42

Samson watched the quadroon's delicate, high-bred features, her skin almost paler than her young mistress's, her figure like the clove's after a hard winter--the more active that a little meagre--her head small, and its tresses soft as the crow blackbird's plumage, and the loyalty that lay in her large eyes, like strong pa.s.sion, for her mistress, was turned to pride, and nearly scorn, when they listened to him.

"A slave, Miss Vesty says"--Virgie spoke with almost fierceness--"is not one that's owned, half as much as one that sells himself--to hard drink, or to selfishness, or to fear. You're not a free man, Samson, if you're afraid, and are like these low slave negroes who dare nothing if they can only get a little low pleasure. All that can make a black man white, in my eyes, is a white man's enterprise."

Vesta felt, as she often had done, the capable soul of her servant, and did not resent her spirit as unbecoming a slave, but rather felt responsive chords in her own nature, as if, indeed, Virgie was the more imperious of the two. Coming now into full womanhood, her race elements finding their composition, her character unrestrained by any one in Teackle Hall, Virgie was her young mistress's shield-bearer, like David to the princely Jonathan.

"Why, Virgie," Samson answered, with humility, "I never meant not to go, lady gal, after marster's wife asked me, I only wanted you to beg me hard, an' mebbe I'd git a kiss befo' I started."

"Wait till you come back, and see if you do your errand well," Virgie spoke again. "I shall not kiss you now."

"I will," cried little Roxy, to the amus.e.m.e.nt of them all, giving Samson a hearty smack from her little pouting mouth; "and now you've got it, think it's Virgie's kiss, and get your breakfast and start!"

As they went to their abodes to make ready, Jimmy Phoebus found Jack Wonnell playing marbles with the boys at the court-house corner.

"Jack," he said, "I'm a-going to find Levin an' that n.i.g.g.e.r trader. I may git in a peck of trouble up yonder on the Nantic.o.ke. Tell all the pungy men whair I'm a-goin', an' what fur."

"Can't I do somethin' fur you, Jimmy? Can't I give you one o' my bell-crowns; thair's a-plenty of 'em left."

"Take my advice, Jack, an' tie a stone to all them hats and sink' em in the Manokin. Ole Meshach's hat has made more hokey-pokey than the Bank of Somerset. Pore an' foolish as you air, maybe your ole bell-crowns will ruin you."

The road to Salisbury--laid out in 1667, when "Cecil, Lord of Maryland and Avalon," erected a county "in honor of our dear sister, the Lady Mary Somerset"--followed the beaver-dams across the little river-heads, and pierced the flat pine-woods and open farms, and pa.s.sed through two little hamlets, before our travellers saw the broad mill-ponds and poplar and mulberry lined streets of the most active town--albeit without a court-house--in the lower peninsula. Jimmy Phoebus, driving the two horses and the family carriage, and Samson, following on his mule, descended into the hollow of Salisbury at the dinner-hour, and stopped at the hotel. The snore of grist-mills, the rasp of mill-saws, the flow of pine-colored breast-water into the gorge of the village, the forest cypress-trees impudently intruding into the obliquely-radiating streets, and humidity of ivy and creeper over many of the old, gable-chimneyed houses, the long lumber-yards reflected in the swampy harbor among the canoes, pungies, and sharpies moored there, the small houses sidewise to the sandy streets, the larger ones rising up the sandy hills, the old box-bush in the silvery gardens, the bridges close together, and the smell of tar and sawdust pleasantly inhaled upon the lungs, made a combination like a caravan around some pool in the Desert of the Nile.

"If there is any chance to catch my negroes," Mrs. Custis said, "I will go right on after dinner. Samson, send Dave, my daughter's boy, to me immediately; he is working in this hotel."

Samson found Dave to be none other than the black cla.s.s-leader he had failed to overcome at the beginning of our narrative, but changes were visible in that individual Samson had not expected. From having a clean, G.o.dly, modest countenance, becoming his professions, Dave now wore a sour, evil look; his eyes were blood-shotten, and his straight, manly shoulders and chest, which had once exacted Samson's admiration and envy, were stooped to conform with a cough he ever and anon made from deep in his frame.

"Dave," said Samson, "your missis's modder wants you, boy, to drive her to Vienny. What ails you, Dave, sence I larned you to box?"

"Is you de man?" Dave exclaimed, hoa.r.s.ely; "den may de Lord forgive you, fur _I_ never kin. Dat lickin' I mos' give you, made me a po', wicked, backslidin' fool."

"Why, Dave, I jess saw you was a _good_ man; I didn't mean you no harm, boy."

"You ruined me, free n.i.g.g.e.r," repeated the huge slave, with a scowl, partly of revenge and partly remorse. "You set up my conceit dat I could box. I had never struck a chile till dat day; after dat I went aroun'

pickin' quarrels wid bigger n.i.g.g.e.rs, an' low white men backed me to fight. I was turned out o' my church; I turned my back on de Lord; whiskey tuk hold o' me, Samson. De debbil has entered into Cla.s.s-leader Dave."

"Oh, brudder, wake up an' do better. Yer, I give you a dollar, an' want to be your friend, Davy, boy."

"I'll git drink wid it," Dave muttered, going; and, as he pa.s.sed out of the stable-door he looked back at Samson fiercely, and exclaimed, "May Satan burn your body as he will burn my soul. I hate you, man, long as you live!"

Jimmy Phoebus remarked, a few moments afterwards, that Dave, dividing a pint of spirits with a lean little mulatto boy, put a piece of money in the boy's hands, who then rode rapidly out of the tavern-yard upon a fleet Chincoteague pony.

At two o'clock they again set forward, the man Dave driving the carriage and Jimmy Phoebus sitting beside him, while Samson easily kept alongside upon his old roan mule, the road becoming more sandy as they ascended the plateau between the Wicomico and Nantic.o.ke, and the carriage drawing hard.

"If it is too late to keep on beyond Vienna to-night," said Mrs. Custis, "I will stop there with my friends, the Turpins, and start again, after coffee, in the morning, and reach Cambridge for breakfast."

"I will turn off at Spring Hill," Samson spoke, "and I kin feed my mule at sundown in Laurel an' go to sleep."

In an hour they came in sight of old Spring Hill church, a venerable relic of the colonial Established Church, at the sources of a creek called Rewastico; and before they crossed the creek the driver, Dave, called "Ho, ho!" in such an unnecessarily loud voice that Mrs. Custis reproved him sharply. Dave jumped down from the seat and appeared to be examining some part of the breeching, though Samson a.s.sured him that it was all right. As Dave finished his examination, he raised both hands above his head twice, and stretched to the height of his figure as he stood on the brow of a little hill.

"Missy Custis," he apologized, as he turned back, "I is tired mighty bad dis a'ternoon. Dat stable keeps me up half de night."

"Liquor tires you more, David," Mrs. Custis spoke, sharply; "and that tavern is no place to hire you to with your appet.i.te for drink, as I shall tell your master."

At this moment Jimmy Phoebus observed the lean little mulatto boy who had left the hotel come up out of the swampy place in the road and exchange a look of intelligence with Dave as he rode past on the pony.

"Boy," cried Samson, "is dat de road to Laurel?"

The boy made no answer, but, looking back once, timidly, ground his heels into the pony's flank and darted into the brush towards Salisbury.

"Samson," spoke Dave, "you see dat ole woman in de cart yonder?"--he pointed to a figure ascending the rise in the ground beyond the brook--"I know her, an' she's gwyn right to Laurel. She lives dar. It's ten miles from dis yer turn-off, an' she knows all dese yer woods-roads."

"Good-bye, den, an' may you find Aunt Hominy an' de little chillen, Jimmy, an' bring dem all home to Prencess Anne from dat ar Joe Johnson!"

cried Samson, and trotted his mule through the swamp and away. Jimmy Phoebus saw him overtake the old woman in the cart and begin to speak with her as the scrubby woods swallowed them in.

"What's dat he said about Joe Johnson?" observed Dave, after a bad spell of coughing, as they cleared the old church and entered the sandy pine-woods.

Mrs. Custis spoke up more promptly than Jimmy Phoebus desired, and told the negro about the escape of Hominy and the children, and the hope of Mr. Phoebus to head the party off as they ascended the Nantic.o.ke towards the Delaware state-line.

"You don't want to git among Joe Johnson's men, boss?" said the red-eyed negro; "dey bosses all dis country heah, on boff sides o' de state-line.

All dat ain't in wid dem is afraid o' dem."

"How fur is it from this road to Delaware, Dave?" asked Phoebus.

"We're right off de corner-stone o' Delawaw state dis very minute. It's hardly a mile from whar we air. De corner's squar as de stone dat sots on it, an' is cut wid a pictur o' de king's crown."

"Mason and Dixon's line they call it," interpreted Mrs. Custis.

"Do you know Joe Johnson, Dave?"

"Yes, Marster Phoebus, you bet I does. He's at Salisbury, he's at Vienna, he's up yer to Crotcher's Ferry, he's all ober de country, but he don't go to Delawaw any more in de daylight. He was whipped dar, an'

banished from de state on pain o' de gallows. But he lives jess on dis side o' de Delawaw line, so dey can't git him in Delawaw. He calls his place Johnson's Cross-roads: ole Patty Cannon lives dar, too. She's afraid to stay in Delawaw now."

"Why, what is the occupation of those terrible people at present?" asked Mrs. Custis.

No answer was made for a minute, and then Dave said, in a low, frightened voice, as he stole a glance at both of his companions out of his fiery, scarred eyes:

"Kidnappin', I 'spect."

"It's everything that makes Pangymonum," Jimmy Phoebus explained; "that old woman, Patty Cannon, has spent the whole of a wicked life, by smoke!--or ever sence she came to Delaware from Cannady, as the bride of pore Alonzo Cannon--a-makin' robbers an' bloodhounds out of the young men she could git hold of. Some of' em she sets to robbin' the mails, some to makin' an' pa.s.sin' of counterfeit money, but most of 'em she sets at stealin' free n.i.g.g.e.rs outen the State of Delaware; and, when it's safe, they steal slaves too. She fust made a tool of Ebenezer Johnson, the pirate of Broad Creek, an' he died in his tracks a-fightin fur her. Then she took hold of his sons, Joe Johnson an' young Ebenezer, an' made 'em both outlaws an' kidnappers, an' Joe she married to her daughter, when Bruington, her first son-in-law, had been hanged. When Samson Hat, who is the whitest n.i.g.g.e.r I ever found, knocked Joe Johnson down in Princess Anne, the night before last, he struck the worst man in our peninsula."

Dave listened to this recital with such a deep interest that his breath, strong with apple whiskey, came short and hot, and his hands trembled as he guided the horses. At the last words, he exclaimed:

"Samson knocked Joe Johnson down? Den de debbil has got him, and means to pay him back!"

"What's that?" cried Jimmy Phoebus.

The sweat stood on the big slave's forehead, as if his imagination was terribly possessed, but before he could explain Mrs. Custis interrupted:

"I think it was said that old Patty Cannon corrupted Jake Purnell, who cut his throat at Snow Hill five years ago. He was a free negro who engaged slaves to steal other slaves and bring them to him, and he delivered them up to the white kidnappers for money; and n.o.body could account for his prosperity till a negro who had been beaten to death was found in the Pocomoke River, and three slaves who had been seen in his company were arrested for the murder. They confessed that they had stolen the dead negro and he had escaped from them, and was so beaten with clubs, to make him tractable, that when they gave him to Purnell his life was all gone. Then he was thrown in the river, but his body came up after sinking, and the confession of the wretched tools explained to the slave-owners where all their missing negroes had gone.