The Entailed Hat Part 43

They marched and surrounded Purnell's hut, and he was discovered burrowed beneath it. They brought the dogs, and fire to drive him out, and as he came out he cut his throat with desperate slashes from ear to ear."

During this narrative the man Dave had listened with rising nervous excitement, rolling his eyes as if in strong inward torment, till the concluding words inspired such terror in him that he dropped the reins, threw back his head, and shouted, with large beads of sweat all round his brow:

"Mercy! mercy! Have mercy! Save me, oh, my Lord!"

"He's got a fit, I reckon," cried Jimmy Phoebus, promptly grasping the reins as the horses started at the cry, and with his leg pinning Dave to the carriage-seat. At that moment the road descended into the hollow of Barren Creek, and, leaping down at the old Mineral Springs Hotel, a health resort of those days, Phoebus humanely procured water and freshened up the gasping negro's face.

"I declare, I am almost afraid to trust myself to this man," Mrs. Custis observed, with more distaste than trepidation.

"Every n.i.g.g.e.r in this region," exclaimed Jimmy Phoebus, "thinks Pangymonum's comin' down at the dreaded name of Patty Cannon; an' this n.i.g.g.e.r's gone most to ruin, any way."

"Oh, marster," exclaimed the slave, recovering his speech and glaring wildly around, "I hain't been always the pore sinner rum an' fightin'

has made of me. I served the Lord all my youth; I praised his name an'

kept the road to heaven; an' thinkin' of the shipwreck I'se made of a good conscience, an' hearin' missis tell of the end of Jake Purnell, it made me yell to de good Lord for mercy, mercy, oh, my soul!"

His frightful agitation increased, and Jimmy Phoebus soothed him, good-naturedly saying:

"Mrs. Custis, I reckon you'd better let him come in the tavern and take a little sperits; it'll strengthen his nerves an' make him drive better."

As they drank at the old summer-resort bar, at that time in the height of its celebrity, and the only _spa_ on the peninsula, south of the Brandywine Springs, Phoebus spoke low to the negro:

"Dave, somethin' not squar and fair is a-workin' yer, by smoke! I've got my eye on you, n.i.g.g.e.r, an' sure as hokey-pokey thair it'll stay. You know my arrand yer, Dave: to save a pore, ignorant, deluded black woman from Joe Johnson's band. Now, you've been a-cryin 'Mercy!' I want you to show mercy by a-tellin' of me whar I'm to overtake an' sarch Levin Dennis's cat-boat if it comes up the Nantic.o.ke to-night with them people and Joe Johnson aboard!"

Having swallowed his liquor greedily, the colored man replied, with his former lowering countenance and evasive eyes:

"You can't do nothin' as low down de river as Vienny, 'case de Nantic.o.ke is too wide dar, and if you cross it at Vienny ferry, den you got de Norfwest Fork between you and Johnson's Cross-roads, wid one ferry over dat, at Crotcher's, an' Joe Johnson owns all dat place. But you kin keep up dis side o' de Nantic.o.ke, Marster Phoebus, de same distance as from yer to Vienny, to de pint whar de Norfwest Fork come in. Sometimes Joe Johnson sails up dat big fork to get to his cross-roads. In gineral he keeps straight up de oder fork to Betty Twiford's wharf, right on de boundary line."

"How far is that?"

"It's five miles from yer to Vienny, and five miles from yer to a landin' opposite de Norfwest Fork. Four miles furder on you're at Sharptown, an' dar you can see Betty Twiford's house on de bank two miles acrost de Nantic.o.ke."

"Nine miles, then, to Sharptown! He's had the tide agin him since he entered the Nantic.o.ke, and it's not turned yit. By smoke! I'll look for a conveyance!"

"You can ride with me to the first landing," spoke up a n.o.ble-looking man, whip in hand; "and after delaying a little there, I shall go on the Sharptown ferry and cross the river."

Phoebus accepted the invitation immediately, and cautioning Mrs.

Custis to speak with less freedom in that part of the country, he bade her adieu, and took the vacant seat in the stranger's buggy.

When Mrs. Custis came to Vienna ferry, and the horses and carriage went on board the scow to be rowed to the little, old, shipping settlement of that name, the negro Dave, standing at the horses' heads, exchanged a few sentences with the ferry-keeper.

"Dave," called Mrs. Custis, a little later on, "you have no love, I see, for old Samson."

"He made a boxer outen me an' a bad man, missis."

"Do you know the man he works for--Meshach Milburn?"

"No, missis. I never see him."

"He wears a peculiar hat--nothing like gentlemen's hats nowadays: it is a hat out of a thousand."

"I never did see it, missis."

"You cannot mistake it for any other hat in the world. Now, Samson is the only servant and watchman at Mr. Milburn's store, and he attends to that disgraceful hat. If you can ever get it from him, Dave, and destroy it, you will be doing a useful act, and I will reward you well."

The moody negro looked up from his remorseful, brutalized orbs, and said:

"Steal it?"

"Oh, no, I do not advise a theft, David--though such a wretched hat can have no legal value. It is an affliction to my daughter and Judge Custis and all of us, and you might find some way to destroy it--that is all."

"I'll git it some day," the negro muttered; and drove into the old tobacco-port of Vienna.

CHAPTER XXII.

NANTIc.o.kE PEOPLE.

A map would be out of place in a story, yet there are probably some who perceive that this is a story with a reality; and if such will take any atlas and open it at the "Middle States" of the American republic, they will see that the little State of Delaware is fitted as nicely into a square niche of Maryland as if it were a lamp, or piece of statuary, standing on a mantelpiece. It stands there on a mantelshelf about forty miles wide, and rises to more than three times that height, making a perfectly straight north and south line at right angles with its base.

Thus mortised into Maryland, its ragged eastern line is formed of the Atlantic Ocean and the broad Delaware Bay.

The only considerable river within this narrow strip or _Hermes_ of a state is the Nantic.o.ke, which, like a crack in the wall,--and the same blow fractured the image on the mantel,--flows with breadth and tidal ebb and flow from the Chesapeake Bay through the Eastern Sh.o.r.e of Maryland into Delaware, and is there formed of two tidal sources, the one to the north continuing to be called the Nantic.o.ke, and that to the south--nearly as imposing a stream--named Broad Creek.

Nature, therefore, as if antic.i.p.ating some foolish political boundaries on the part of man, prepared one drain and channel of ingress at the southwestern corner of Delaware to the splendid bay of Virginia.

Around that corner of the little Delaware commonwealth, in a flat, poor, sandy, pine-grown soil, Jimmy Phoebus rode by the stranger in the afternoon of October, with the sun, an hour high in the west, shining upon his dark, Greekish cheeks and neck, and he hearing the fall birds whistle and cackle in the mellowing stubble and golden thickets.

The meadow-lark, the boy's delight, was picking seed, gravel, and insects' eggs in the fields--large and partridge-like, with breast washed yellow from the bill to the very knees, except at the throat, where hangs a brilliant reticule of blackish brown; his head and back are of hawkish colors--umber, brown, and gray--and in his carriage is something of the gamec.o.c.k. He flies high, sometimes alone, sometimes in the flock, and is our winter visitor, loving the old fields improvidence has abandoned, and uttering, as he feeds, the loud sounds of challenge, as if to cry, "Abandoned by man; pre-empted by me!"

Jimmy Phoebus also heard the bold, bantering woodp.e.c.k.e.r, with his red head, whose schoolmaster is the squirrel, and whose tactics of keeping a tree between him and his enemy the Indian fighters adopted. He mimics the tree-frog's cry, and migrates after October, like other voluptuaries, who must have the round year warm, and fruit and eggs always in market. Dressed in his speckled black swallow-tail coat, with his long pen in his mouth and his shirt-bosom faultlessly white, the woodp.e.c.k.e.r works like some Balzac in his garret, making the tree-top lively as he spars with his fellow-Bohemians; and being sure himself of a tree, and clinging to it with both tail and talons, he esteems everything else that lives upon it to be an insect at which he may run his bill or spit his tongue--that tongue which is rooted in the brain itself.

In the hollow golden bowl of echoing evening the sailor noted, too, the flicker, in golden pencilled wings and back of speckled umber and mottled white breast, with coal-black collar and neck and head of cinnamon. His golden tail droops far below his perch, and, running downward along the tree-trunk, it flashes in the air like a sceptre over the wood-lice he devours with his pickaxe bill. "Go to the ant, thou sluggard!" was an instigation to murder in the flicker, who loves young ants as much as wild-cherries or Indian corn, and is capable of taking any such satire seriously upon things to eat. Not so elfin and devilish as the small black woodp.e.c.k.e.r, he is full of bolder play.

The redbird, like the unclaimed blood of Abel, flew to the little trees that grew low, as if to cover Abel's altar; the jack-snipe chirped in the swampy spots, like a divinity student, on his clean, long legs, probing with his bill and critical eye the Scriptures of the fields; the quail piped like an old bachelor with family cares at last, as he led his mate where the wild seeds were best; and through the air darted voices of birds forsaken or on doctor's errands, crying "Phoebe?

Phoebe?" or "Killed he! killed he!"

"Are you a dealer?" asked the gentleman of Jimmy Phoebus.

"Just a little that way," said Jimmy, warily, "when I kin git somethin'

cheap."

The stranger had a pair of keen, dancing eyes, and a long, eloquent, silver-gray face that might have suited a great general, so fine was its command, and yet too narrowly dancing in the eyes, like spiders in a well, disturbing the mirror there.

"Ha!" chuckled the man, as if his eyes had chuckled, so poorly did that sound represent his lordly stature and look of high spirit--"ha! that's what brings them all to my neighbor Johnson: a fair quotient!"

"Quotient?" repeated Jimmy.