Chapter 26

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.