The Entailed Hat Part 46

He took the child again and amused it while the woman carefully cleaned his wound and rebandaged it so that he could breathe and see and eat, though the cotton folds wrapped in much of his face like a mask. He then examined the chain again, especially where it was rivetted at the feet, and lifted a large iron ball weighing several pounds, which was also affixed to her ankle, so that she could not climb the tree. Her ankle he found blistered by the red-hot rivet being smithed so barbarously close to the flesh.

"Don't leave me, oh! don't leave me here to die," the woman pleaded, as he started into the woods.

"I'll stay by you an' we'll die together, if we must; but it's not my idee to die at all, Mary. I'm goin' to bring that air scow ash.o.r.e while I cut a hickory, if I can find one, to break this yer chain."

Plunging again into the mud nearly to his waist, Phoebus pulled the scow up into the woods, and had barely concealed himself when he saw come out of the creek below Twiford's house a cat-boat like the _Ellenora Dennis_, and stand towards the island in the cripple.

"The tide's agin' em, an' they must make a tack to get yer," Jimmy muttered; "but I'm afraid this knife will have to go to the heart of some son of Pangymonum in ten minutes, or Ellenory Dennis never agin be pestered by her ugly lover."

He was seized with a certain frenzy of strength and discernment at the danger he was in, and, as he carried the scow onward and across the woodland island, heavy as it was, he also noted a single small hickory tree on that farther margin, and threw himself against it and bent it down, and plunged his knife into the straining fibres so that it crackled and splintered in his hand. He leaped to the tree and scaled it as he had often climbed a mast, and he thrust the sapling under the staple, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the point down with the knife as he clutched the tree by his knees, and then, catching the young hickory like a lever, he dropped down the pine trunk and got his shoulder under the sapling and brought the weight of his body desperately against it. The staple bent upward in the tree, but did not loosen.

At that instant the sc.r.a.ping of a boat upon the mud was heard, and the black woman fell upon her knees.

"Pray, but do it soft," Jimmy whispered; "an' not a cry from the child, or there'll be a murder!"

He had rapidly trimmed the hickory stem of its branches while he spoke, so that it could penetrate the arborage of the tree from above, and climbing higher, like a cat, he worked the point of the lever downwards into the now crooked staple, and threw himself out of the tree against the sapling, which bent like a bow nearly double, but would not break, and, as the staple yielded and flew out, the chain and the deliverer fell together on the soft pine litter.

"Hark!" exclaimed a voice through the woods.

"What was it?" asked another voice.

"Come!" Phoebus murmured, and gathered together the woman, the child, and the chain and ball, and stepped, long and silent as a rabbit's leaps, through the awe-hushed pines, carrying the whole burden on his shoulders.

He sat them in the scow, which sank to the edges, and, covered by a protruding point of woods, pushed off into the deep river, yet guiding the frail vessel in to the sides of the stream, away from the influence of the out-running tide. As the scow turned the first crease or elbow in the river, it began to sink.

"If you make a sound you are a slave fur life," whispered the waterman, as he slipped overboard and began to swim, with his hand upon the stern.

As he did this, straining every muscle of his countenance to keep afloat, the wound in his cheek began to bleed again, and he felt his strength going. Down, down he began to settle, till the water reached his nostrils, and the woman heard him sigh as he was sinking:

"I'd do it--an' die--agin--fur--Ellenory. G.o.d bless her!"

The scow, now full of water, turned upside down, and threw mother and child into the stream, and the child was gone beneath the surface before the woman could catch herself upon a sunken branch of an imbedded tree; and, as she gasped there, the body of the pungy captain swept past her and she caught him by the hair, and he clutched her with the drowning instinct, and down they went together, like husband and wife, in nature's contempt of distinctions between living worms.

They went down to the very bottom, but not to drown; for the old tree, having fallen where it grew in other years, was sustained upon its limbs, and made an invisible yet sure pathway to the sh.o.r.e. The long chain and the iron ball fettered to the colored woman's foot, however, deprived her for a few moments of all power to step along the slippery, submerged trunk, and, with her soul full of agony for her child, which she no longer saw, she was about to let go of her deliverer's body and throw herself also into the river, to die with them, when the old scow, having emptied itself of the water, reappeared at the surface and struck the woman a buoyant blow that altered the course of her thought.

"Pore, brave man," the woman gasped. "He's got a wife, maybe. He said, 'G.o.d bless her,' an' he give his life for a poor creature like me. G.o.d has took my baby. I can't do nothing for it now, but maybe I can save this man's life before I die."

Indifferent to her personal fate, she drew intelligence from her spirit of sacrifice, which is the only thing better than learning. She pushed the scow down and under Phoebus with her remaining hand, till it relieved her of a portion of the weight of his body, and rose up, half-bearing the bronze-faced sailor's form, and animating her generous purpose with the honest and happy smile he wore upon his face, even in the vestibule of the eternal palace. Then, gathering the long meshes of the iron chain up from its termination at her feet, she threw the longer portion of it into the scow, so that it no longer became entangled in the cross-branches and knots below, and she could lift also the iron ball sufficiently to glide her feet along the tree.

With pain and difficulty, lessened by self-forgetfulness, she pushed the scow and the body to the foot of the tree, and, feeling around its old roots for further support, the red-eyed terrapins arose and swam around her, disturbed in their possessions; but she feared no reptiles any more, since Death, the mighty crocodile, had eaten the babe that she had nursed but this morning.

She had intelligent remembrance enough to think of all the precautions her deliverer had taken, and, when she had dragged his body on the sh.o.r.e into the dense, scrubby woods, she also drew out the little scow and heaped some dead brush upon it, and had scarcely concealed herself when she heard voices from the river, and the report of a sail swung around upon its boom, and of feet upon a deck. The voices said:

"If she's got off to Delaware, Joe Johnson won't have long to stay on his visit; for all the beaks will gather fur him an' be started by John M. Clayton."

"I'm sorry fur Joe," answered another voice; "he hoped to make one more big scoop this trip, an' quit the Corners fur good."

"Let us sail by ole Ebenezer Johnson's roost at Broad Creek mouth, an'

peep up both forks of the river," said the other voice, receding; "it's only a mile and a half. If we discover nothin', we'll run down the river and inquire at the landings as fur as Vienny."

The colored woman now worked with all her strength to revive the insensible sailor, rolling him, rubbing his body till her elbows seemed almost to be dropping off, and then rubbing his great, broad breast with her head and face and neck. She breathed into his mouth the breath heaven vouchsafed to Hagar as bountifully as to Sarah, and, wringing out portions of her garments and hanging them at sunny exposures to dry, she subst.i.tuted them, in her exhausted intervals, for the wet clothing of the man; and as she worked, with a hollow, desolate heart, she sobbed:

"Lord, gi' me this man's life! O Lord, that took my chile, I will have this life back!"

Crying and weeping, fainting and laboring, the moments, it seemed the very hours, ran by and still he did not waken; and still, with all that n.o.ble strength that makes the fields of white men grow and blossom under the negro's unthanked toil, the widow and childless one fought on for this cold lump of brother nature.

He warmed, he breathed, he groaned, he spoke!

His voice was like a happy sigh, as of one disturbed near the end of a comforting morning nap in summer:

"You thar, Mary?"

He stared around with difficulty, his wounded face now clotted and stained with blood, and his eyes next looked an inquiry so kind and apprehensive that she answered it, to save him breath:

"Baby's drowned. G.o.d does best!"

He reached his hand to hers--she was almost naked to the waist, having sacrificed all she had, the greatest of which was modesty, to bring back that life in him which came naked and unashamed into the world--and he put his little strength into the grasp.

"Mary," he exhaled, "why didn't you ketch the baby and leave me go?"

"Oh, dearly as I loved it," the woman answered, "I'm glad you come up under my hands instead. You can do good: you're a white man. Baby would have only been a poor slave, or a free negro n.o.body would care for."

"I mean to do good, if the Lord lets me," sighed the sailor; "I mean to go and die agin for human natur at Johnson's Cross-roads."

CHAPTER XXIV.

OLD CHIMNEYS.

The day was far advanced when Jimmy Phoebus was strong enough to rise and walk, and leave the refuge in the woods. He advised the colored woman to crawl through the pine-trees along the margin, while he paddled in the old scow in the shadow of the forest, which now lay strong upon the river's breast.

At the distance of about a mile, Broad Creek, like a tributary river, flowed into the Nantic.o.ke from the east, fully a quarter of a mile wide, and half a mile up this stream an old, low, extended, weather-blackened house faced the river, and seemed to grin out of its broken ribs and hollow window-sockets like a traitor's skull discolored upon a gibbet.

It was falling to pieces, and along its roof-ridge a line of crows balanced and croaked, as if they had fine stories to tell and weird opinions to pa.s.s upon the former inhabitants of the tenement.

"There, I have hearn tell," said Jimmy, as he drew in to the bank, and took the woman into the scow and began to tow her along the beach, wading in the water, "_there_, I have hearn tell, lived the pirate of Broad Creek, ole Ebenezer Johnson, who was shot soon after the war of '12 at Twiford's house down yonder."

"For kidnapping free people?" asked the woman, without interest, the question coming from her desolate heart.

"In them days they didn't kidnap much; it was jest a-beginnin'. The war of '12 busted everything on the bay, burned half a dozen towns, kept the white men layin' out an' watchin', and made loafers of half of 'em, an'

brought bad volunteers an' militia yer to trifle with the porer gals, an' some of them strangers stuck yer after the war was done. I don't know whar ole Ebenezer come from; some says this, an' some that. All we know is, that he an' the Hanlen gals, one of 'em Patty Cannon, was the head devils in an' after the war."

"It's a bad-lookin' ole house, sir. See, yonder's a c.o.o.n runnin' out of the door. Oh! I hear my child cryin' everywhere I look."

"The British begun to run the black people off in the war. The black people wanted to go to 'em. The British filled the islands in Tangier yer with n.i.g.g.e.r camps; they was a goin' to take this whole peninsuly, an' collect an' drill a n.i.g.g.e.r army on it to put down Amerikey. When the war was done, the British sailed away from Chesapeake Bay with thousands of them colored folks, an' then the people yer begun to hate the free n.i.g.g.e.rs."

"For lovin' liberty?" the woman sighed, looking at the ball, which had galled her ankle b.l.o.o.d.y.