The Entailed Hat Part 48

Completely sheltered by the longer porch, Phoebus, looking into a window, there saw a table already set with a clean cloth, and bread and cold chicken, and a pitcher of creamy milk, with a piece of ice floating in it. On either side of a large fireplace at the table-side was a door, one open, and leading by a small winding stair to the floor above. A bed was also in the room, which looked out by one window upon the lawn and the river, and by the other at the farm, the corn-cribs, and the small barns and pound-yard.

With a sailor's quiet, sliding feet, Jimmy walked into the low hall, and a cat-bird, in a cage there, immediately started such a shrill series of cries that his steps were unheard by himself.

"n.o.body bein' yer," thought Jimmy, "an' the flies gittin 'at the victuals, I reckon I'll do as I would be done by."

So he began to eat, and soon he heard a female voice, very close by, sound down the stairs, as if reciting to another person.

"Aunt Patty says Aunt Betty's first husband, Captain Twiford, was a sea-captain and a widower, and she was one of the beautiful Hanley girls, brought up by old Ebenezer Johnson at his house across on Broad Creek; and there Captain Twiford courted her, and brought her here to live. He died early--all my aunties' husbands died early--and is buried in the vault out here behind the pound, where you can go in and see him in his shroud, lying by Aunt Betty. Her next husband, John Gillis, left her, and then she lived with William Russell, a negro-trader. Aunt Patty governed all her sisters and the Johnson boys, too. Oh, how I fear her when she looks at me sometimes with her bold, black eyes: I can't help it."

Another voice, not a woman's, yet almost as gentle, now seemed to ask a question; but the cat-bird, behaving like a detective and a tale-bearer, made such a furious screaming at seeing a stranger drinking the milk, that Phoebus could not hear it well. The pleasant female voice spoke again:

"Yes, he was killed in the room under this, before I was born, Aunt Patty says; and sometimes she likes to tell such dark and b.l.o.o.d.y tales, and laughs with joy to see me frightened at them. Aunt Betty got in debt, and this house and farm were sold under executions and bought by a Maryland man, who stole an opportunity when the men were away, and set his goods in the house and set Aunt Betty's goods outside upon the lawn.

It's only a mile, or a little more, from here to Ebenezer Johnson's, and the news of the seizure was sent there."

Jimmy tore off a piece of chicken with his teeth, listening voraciously.

"Did you hear anything?" continued the voice; "I thought I did. The dogs are chained up in the smoke-house, and bad people are often coming here; I will go turn the dogs loose."

"Be dogged if you do!" Jimmy reflected. "That's the meanest cat-bird ever I see, fur now it's shut up a-purpose."

There sounded something familiar to the uninvited guest in the voice which seemed to delay this intention; but the cat-bird, with his unaccommodating mood, broke right in again. Then the female continued:

"While the men--who had come armed, expecting trouble--were removing Aunt Betty's goods out of the room, throwing many of them out of the windows, so as to be themselves in sole possession, a sound was heard in the room below, where your meal is now ready, like a panther skipping and lashing his tail; and, before the men could breathe, old Ebenezer Johnson was up the stairs and laying about him. His eyes were full of murder. One man jumped right through that window and rolled off the porch; another he pitched down the stairs; the third was a boy, Joe King, barely grown--he lives not far from this house now--and Ebenezer Johnson dashed him down the stairs, too, and started after him. All his life the boy had been taught to dread that terrible man, and now he was in his hands, or flying before him; and, as he reeled through the room below, out of the door that opens on the back porch, the boy's eyes, in the agony of the fear of death, beheld a rifle leaning there."

"Mighty good thing if it was thar now!" Jimmy inwardly remarked, finishing the chicken, and still hungry.

"Oh, there _is_ a noise somewhere in this house," the voice exclaimed; "I never tell this story but it makes me startled at every sound. The boy, as he whirled past, grasped the long rifle, drew it to his shoulder, and, with a young volunteer's skill--for he had been drilling to fight the British--he put the two b.a.l.l.s in that old man's brain. Both b.a.l.l.s entered over the left eyebrow, and one pa.s.sed through the head and was found in the wall; the other never was found.[3] The lawless giant gave a trembling motion through his frame, his eyes glazed, and he sank dead upon the floor without a sound--the wicked had ceased from troubling! Aunt Betty, Aunt Patty, and Aunt Jane, three sisters shaped by him in soul, fell on his body and wept and almost prayed, but it was too late. They buried him near Aunt Betty, in the field behind the pound."

Undertaking to rise from his chair, Jimmy Phoebus made a loud sc.r.a.ping on the floor, and the table-knife fell with a ringing sound.

"Who's there?" cried a voice, and added, "I knew the dogs ought to be loose."

"Who's there?" also asked the other voice, with something very familiar to Phoebus in its sounds.

"E-b-e-n-e-z-e-r John-son!" answered Jimmy, in his deepest ba.s.s tones, mentally considering that a ghost might carry more terror than a robber, after that tale.

A little scream followed, and a whispered consultation, and then a girl's bare feet, beautifully moulded, slowly descended the steep stairway, and next a slender, graceful body came into view, and finally a face, delicious as a ripe peach, looked once at the intruder below, and all the pink and bright color faded from it to see, standing there, where Ebenezer Johnson had given up the ghost, a stalwart effigy, bandaged in white all round the head, and over the left eye and cheek, where the dead river-pirate had received his double bullet, the blood was hideously matted and not wholly stanched even yet. She sank slowly down upon the steps and saw no more.

"Now, if I don't git out, the dogs will be set loose," muttered Jimmy, as he disappeared up the farm-house lane and put the barn and pound between him and the house; and scarcely had he done so when Levin Dennis appeared coming down the stairs, all unconscious of the apparition, and, finding the beautiful girl insensible, he raised her in his arms and stole a kiss.

Paying for his one act of deceit by losing the princ.i.p.al object of his quest, Jimmy Phoebus stopped a minute by Ebenezer Johnson's grave.

In a level field of deep sand--the soil here being the poorest in the region--and between the cattle-pound and the pines, which were everywhere jealous of their other indigenous brother, the Indian corn, an old family burial-lot lay under some low cedar-trees, with wild berry bushes growing all around. There were several little stones over Twifords that had died early, and a large heap of sand, planted with some flowers, that might have covered a favorite horse, but which Phoebus believed was the resting-place of the river buccaneer; and there was also a vault of brick and plaster, with the little door ajar, where prurient visitors, themselves with Saul's own selfish curiosity to raise the dead, had poked and peeped about until the coffin lids had been drawn back and the dead pair exposed to the dry peninsular air.

The bay captain looked in and beheld his predecessor, Captain Twiford, who also sailed the bay, lying in his shroud--not in full clothing, as men are buried now, for clothing was too valuable in the scanty-peopled country to feed it to the worms. Twiford lay shrivelled up, shroud and flesh making but one skin, the face of a walnut color, the hair complete, the teeth sound, and severe dignity unrelaxed by the exposure he was condemned to for his evil alliance with Betty Hanley.

She also lay exposed, who had lived so shamelessly, respecting not the mould of beauty G.o.d had given her, till now men leered to look upon her nearly kiln-dried bosom glued into its winding-sheet, and the glory of her hair, that had been handled by bantering outlaws, and in a rippling wave of unbleached coal covered the grinning coquetry of her skull.

"Them that mocks G.o.d shall be mocked of him," said Jimmy Phoebus, closing the door and putting some of the scattered bricks of the vault against it. "Now, I reckon, I kin git to the cross-roads by a leetle after dark."

CHAPTER XXV.

PATTY CANNON'S.

Phoebus pa.s.sed along the side of a large, black, cypress-shaded mill-pond, and found the boundary stone again, and took the angle from its northern face as a compa.s.s-point, and, proceeding in that direction, soon fell in with a sort of blind path hardly feasible for wheels, which ran almost on the line between the states of Maryland and Delaware, pa.s.sing in sight of several of these old boundary stones. Not a dwelling was visible as he proceeded, not even a clearing, not a stream except one mere gutter in the sand, not a man, hardly an animal or a bird; the monotonous sand-pines, too low to moan, too thick to expand, too dry to give shade, yet grew and grew, like poor folks' sandy-headed children, and kept company only with some scrubby oaks that had strayed that way, till pine-cone and acorn seemed to have bred upon each other, and the wild hogs disdained the progeny.

"Maybe I'll git killed up yer in this Pangymonum," Jimmy reflected; "an'

though I 'spose it don't make no difference whair you plant your bones, I don't want to grow up into ole pines. Good, big, preachin' kind of pines, that's a little above the world, an' says 'Holy, rolley, melancho-ly, mind your soul-y'--I could go into their sap and shats fust-rate. But to die yer an' never be found in these desert wastes is pore salvage for a man that's lived among the white sails of the bay, an' loved a woman elegant as Ellenory."

It was dark, and he could hardly see his way in half an hour. Sometimes a crow would caw, to hear strange sounds go past, like an old watchman's rattle moved one cog. The stars became bright, however, and the moon was new, and when Phoebus came to a large cleared opening in the pines, the lambent heavens broke forth and bathed the sandy fields with silver, and showed a large, high house at the middle of the clearing, with outside chimneys, one thicker than the other, and a porch of two stories facing the east.

Though not a large dwelling, it was large for those days and for that unfrequented region, and its roof seemed to Phoebus remarkably steep and long, and yet, while enclosing so much s.p.a.ce, had not a single dormer window in it. The southern gable was turned towards the intruder, and in it were two small windows at the top, crowded between the thick chimney and the roof slope. The two main stories were well lighted, however, and the porch was enclosed at the farther end, making a double outside room there. No sheds, kitchens, or stables were attached to the premises, but an old pole-well, like some catapult, reared its long pole at half an angle between the crotch of another tree. Roads, marked by tall worm fences, crossed at the level vista where this tall house presided, and a quarter of a mile beyond the cross-roads, to the northeast, was another house, much smaller, and hip-gabled, like Twiford's, standing up a lane and surrounded by small stables, cribs, orchard, and garden.

"I never 'spected to come yer," Jimmy Phoebus observed, "but I've hearn tell of this place considabul. The big barn-roofed house is Joe Johnston's tavern for the entertainment of Georgey n.i.g.g.e.r-traders that comes to git his stolen goods. It's at the cross-roads, three miles from Cannon's Ferry, whar the pa.s.sengers from below crosses the Nantic.o.ke fur Easton and the north, an' the stages from Cambridge by the King's road meets 'em yonder at the tavern. The tavern stands in Dorchester County, with a tongue of Caroline reaching down in front of it, an' Delaware state hardly twenty yards from the porch. Thar ain't a court-house within twenty miles, nor a town in ten, except Crotcher's Ferry, whar every Sunday mornin' the people goin' to church kin pick up a basketful of ears, eyes, noses, fingers, an' hair bit off a-fightin' on Sat.u.r.day afternoon. They call the country around Crotcher's, Wire Neck, caze no neck is left thar that kin be twisted off; the country in lower Car'line they calls 'Puckem,' caze the crops is so puckered up. They say Joe's a great man among his neighbors, an' kin go to the Legislater. The t'other house out in the fields is Patty Cannon's own, whar she did all her dev'lishness fur twenty years, till Joe got rich enough to build his palace."

With the rapid execution of a man who only plans with his feet and hands, the bay sailor observed that there was a grove of good high timber--oaks and pines--only a few rods from the cross-roads and to the right, under cover of which he could draw near the tavern. As he proceeded to gain its shade, he heard extraordinary sounds of turbulence from the front of the tavern, the yelling of men, the baying of hounds, oaths and laughter, and, listening as he crossed the intervening s.p.a.ce, he fell into a ditch inadvertently, almost at the edge of the timber.

"Hallo!" cried Jimmy, lying quite still to draw his breath, since the ditch was now perfectly dry, "this ditch seems to me to pint right for that tavern."

He therefore crawled along its dry bed till it crossed under a road by a wooden culvert or little bridge of a few planks.

The noise at the tavern was now like a fight, and, as Phoebus continued to crawl forward, he heard twenty voices, crying,

"Gouge him, Owen Daw!" "Hit him agin, Cyrus James!" "Chaw him right up!"

"Give' em room, boys!"

Having crawled to what he judged the nearest point of concealed approach, Phoebus lost the moment to take a single glance only, and, drawing his old slouched hat down on his face to hide the bandaging, he muttered, "Now's jess my time," and crept up to the back of the crowd, which was all facing inwards in a circle, and did not perceive him.

A fully grown man, as it seemed, was having a fight with a boy hardly fifteen years old; but the boy was the more reckless and courageous of the two, while the man, with three times the boy's strength, lacked the stomach or confidence to avail himself of it; and, having had the boy down, was now being turned by the latter, amid shouts of "Three to two on Owen Daw!" "Bite his nose off, Owen Daw!" "Five to two that Cyrus James gits gouged by Owen Daw!"

The boy with a Celtic face and supple body was full of zeal to merit favor and inflict injury, and, as the circle of vagrants and outlaws of all ages reeled and swayed to and fro, Phoebus, un.o.bserved by anybody, put his head down among the rest and searched the faces for those of Levin Dennis or Joe Johnson.

Neither was there, and the only face which arrested his attention was a woman's, standing in the door of the enclosed s.p.a.ce at the end of the porch, at right angles to the central door of the tavern, and just beside it. The whole building was without paint, and weather-stained, but the room on the porch was manifestly newer, as if it had been an afterthought, and its two windows revealed some of the crude appendages of a liquor bar, as a fire somewhere within flashed up and lighted it.

By this fire the woman's face was also revealed, and she was so much interested in the fight that she turned all parts of her countenance into the firelight, slapping her hands together, laughing like a man, dropping her oaths at the right places, and crying:

"I bet my money on little Owen Daw! Cy James ain't no good, by G.o.d!

Yer's whiskey a-plenty for Owen Daw if he gouges him. Give it to him, Owen Daw! Shame on ye, Cy James!"

There was occasional servility and deference to this woman from members of the crowd, however they were absorbed in the fight. She was what is called a "chunky" woman, short and thick, with a rosy skin, low but pleasing forehead, coal-black hair, a rolling way of swaying and moving herself, a pair of large black eyes, at once daring, furtive, and familiar, and a large neck and large breast, uniting the bull-dog and the dam, cruelty and full womanhood.

Behind this woman, whom Phoebus thought to be Patty Cannon herself, the moonlight from the rear came through the door in the older and main building, shining quite through the house, and Phoebus saw that the rear door was also open and was unguarded.

He took the first chance, therefore, of dodging around the corner of the bar, intending to pa.s.s around the north gable of the house and dart up the stairs by the unwatched door; but he had barely got out of sight when a loud hurrah burst from the crowd as a feeble voice was heard crying "Enough, enough!" followed by jeers rapidly approaching.