CHAPTER XXII.
NANTICOKE PEOPLE.
A map would be out of place in a story, yet there are probably some whoperceive that this is a story with a reality; and if such will take anyatlas and open it at the "Middle States" of the American republic, theywill see that the little State of Delaware is fitted as nicely into asquare niche of Maryland as if it were a lamp, or piece of statuary,standing on a mantelpiece. It stands there on a mantelshelf about fortymiles wide, and rises to more than three times that height, making aperfectly straight north and south line at right angles with its base.Thus mortised into Maryland, its ragged eastern line is formed of theAtlantic Ocean and the broad Delaware Bay.
The only considerable river within this narrow strip or _Hermes_ of astate is the Nanticoke, which, like a crack in the wall,--and the sameblow fractured the image on the mantel,--flows with breadth and tidalebb and flow from the Chesapeake Bay through the Eastern Shore ofMaryland into Delaware, and is there formed of two tidal sources, theone to the north continuing to be called the Nanticoke, and that to thesouth--nearly as imposing a stream--named Broad Creek.
Nature, therefore, as if anticipating some foolish political boundarieson the part of man, prepared one drain and channel of ingress at thesouthwestern 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 theafternoon of October, with the sun, an hour high in the west, shiningupon his dark, Greekish cheeks and neck, and he hearing the fall birdswhistle and cackle in the mellowing stubble and golden thickets.
The meadow-lark, the boy's delight, was picking seed, gravel, andinsects' eggs in the fields--large and partridge-like, with breastwashed yellow from the bill to the very knees, except at the throat,where hangs a brilliant reticule of blackish brown; his head and backare of hawkish colors--umber, brown, and gray--and in his carriage issomething of the gamecock. He flies high, sometimes alone, sometimes inthe flock, and is our winter visitor, loving the old fields improvidencehas 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 woodpecker, with his redhead, whose schoolmaster is the squirrel, and whose tactics of keeping atree between him and his enemy the Indian fighters adopted. He mimicsthe tree-frog's cry, and migrates after October, like othervoluptuaries, who must have the round year warm, and fruit and eggsalways in market. Dressed in his speckled black swallow-tail coat, withhis long pen in his mouth and his shirt-bosom faultlessly white, thewoodpecker works like some Balzac in his garret, making the tree-toplively as he spars with his fellow-Bohemians; and being sure himself ofa tree, and clinging to it with both tail and talons, he esteemseverything else that lives upon it to be an insect at which he may runhis bill or spit his tongue--that tongue which is rooted in the brainitself.
In the hollow golden bowl of echoing evening the sailor noted, too, theflicker, in golden pencilled wings and back of speckled umber andmottled white breast, with coal-black collar and neck and head ofcinnamon. His golden tail droops far below his perch, and, runningdownward along the tree-trunk, it flashes in the air like a sceptre overthe wood-lice he devours with his pickaxe bill. "Go to the ant, thousluggard!" was an instigation to murder in the flicker, who loves youngants as much as wild-cherries or Indian corn, and is capable of takingany such satire seriously upon things to eat. Not so elfin and devilishas the small black woodpecker, he is full of bolder play.
The redbird, like the unclaimed blood of Abel, flew to the little treesthat grew low, as if to cover Abel's altar; the jack-snipe chirped inthe swampy spots, like a divinity student, on his clean, long legs,probing with his bill and critical eye the Scriptures of the fields; thequail piped like an old bachelor with family cares at last, as he ledhis mate where the wild seeds were best; and through the air dartedvoices 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 wasits command, and yet too narrowly dancing in the eyes, like spiders in awell, disturbing the mirror there.
"Ha!" chuckled the man, as if his eyes had chuckled, so poorly did thatsound represent his lordly stature and look of high spirit--"ha! that'swhat brings them all to my neighbor Johnson: a fair quotient!"
"Quotient?" repeated Jimmy.
"Johnson's a great factor hereabout," continued the military-lookingman, bending his handsome eyes on the bay captain, as if there was abusiness secret between them, and peering at once mischievously andnobly; "he makes the quotient to suit. He leaves the suttle large andnever stints the cloff."
"He don't narry a feller down to the cloth he's got, sir?" assentedJimmy, dubiously.
"Why should he? His equation is simple: I suppose you know what it is."
"Not ezackly," answered Phoebus, pricking up his ears to learn.
"Well, it is force and class sympathy against a dead quantity: lawswhich have no consignees, cattle which have no lawyer and no tongue,rights which have lapsed by their assertion being suspended, till demandand supply, like a pair of bulldogs, tear what is left to pieces. Armedwith his _ca. sa._, my neighbor Johnson offsets everybody's _fi. fa._,serves his writ the first, and makes to gentlemen like you asatisfactory quotient. But he cuts no capers with Isaac and JacobCannon!"
"I expect now that you are Jacob Cannon?" remarked the tawny sailor, nothaving understood a word of what preceded. "If that's the case, I'm gladto know your name, and thank you for givin' me this lift."
By a bare nod, just intelligible, Mr. Cannon signified that the guesswould do; and still meditating aloud in his small, grand way,continued:
"We let neighbor Johnson and his somewhat peculiar mother-in-law makesuch commerce as suits him, provided he studies to give us noinconvenience. That is his equation; with his quotient we have noconcern other than our slight interest in his wastage, as when MadameCannon rides down to change a bill and leaves an order forsupplies--rum, chiefly, I believe. Gentlemen like you come into thiscountry to deal, replevin, or what not, and we say to you all, 'Don'ttread on us--that is all.' We shall not look into your parcels, nor lieawake of nights to hear alarms; but harm Isaac and Jacob Cannon oneha'pence and _levari facias, fi. fa.!_"
"And fee-fo-fum," ejaculated Jimmy, cheerfully; "I've hearn it before."
Looking again with some curiosity at his companion, Phoebus saw thathe was not beyond fifty years of age, of a spare, lofty figure--at leastsix feet four high--sitting straight and graceful as an Indian, hisclothes well-tailored, his countenance and features both stern andrefined; every feature perfected, and all keen without being hard orangular--and yet Jimmy did not like him. There seemed to have been madea commodore or a general--some one designed for deeds of chivalry andgreat philanthropy; and yet around and between the dancing eyes spiderlines were drawn, as if the fine high brain of Jacob Cannon had putaside matters that matched it and meddled with nothing that ascendedhigher above the world than the long white bridge of his nose. Hissentiments apparently fell no further towards his heart than that; hisbrain belonged to the bridge of his nose.
"Another Meshach Milburn, by smoke!" concluded Jimmy.
After a little pause Phoebus inquired into the character of the peoplein this apparently new region of country.
"The quotient of much misplanting and lawyering is the lands on theNanticoke," spoke the gray-nosed Apollo; "the piece of country directlybefore us, in the rear of my neighbor Johnson's cross-roads, was an oldIndian reservation for seventy years, and so were three thousand acresto our right, on Broad Creek. The Indian is a bad factor to civilize hiswhite neighbors; he does not know the luxury of the law, that grandcontrivance to ma
ke the equation between the business man and the herd.Ha, ha!"
Mr. Cannon chuckled as if he, at least, appreciated the law, and turnedthe fine horsy bridge of his nose, all gray with dancing eyelight,enjoyingly upon Mr. Phoebus.
"The Indians were long imposed upon, and when they went away, at thebrink of the Revolutionary War, they left a demoralized white race; andothers who moved in upon the deserted lands of the Nanticokes were, ifpossible, more Indian than the Indians. This peninsula never produced agreat Indian, but when Ebenezer Johnson settled on Broad Creek itpossessed a greater savage than Tecumseh. He took what he wanted andappealed to nature, like the Indian. He stole nothing; he merely tookit. He served, with anything convenient, from his fists to ablunderbuss, his _fi. fa._ and his _ca. sa._ upon wondering butsubmissive mankind. Need I say that this was before the perfect day ofIsaac and Jacob Cannon?"
"They would have socked it to him, I reckon," Jimmy exclaimed,consonantly.
Mr. Jacob Cannon gave a tender smile, such as the gray horse emits atthe prospect of oats, and continued:
"Such was the multiplicand to make the future race. Here, too, raged theboundary-line debate between Penns and Calverts, with occasional raidsand broken heads, and a noble suit in chancery of fifty years, till noman's title was known, and, instead of improving their lands, ourvoluptuous predecessors improved chiefly their opportunities. You cutsundry cords of wood and hauled it to the landing, and Ebenezer Johnsoncoolly scowed it over to his paradise at the mouth of Broad Creek. Youhad a little parcel of negroes, but the British war-ships, in twosuccessive wars, lay in the river mouth and beckoned them off. Having nointerest in any certain property, the foresters of the Nanticoke wouldrather trade with the enemy than fight for foolish ideas; and so thisregion was more than half Tory, and is still half passive, the otherhalf predatory. To neither half of such a quotient belongs the house ofIsaac and Jacob Cannon!"
His nostrils swelled a trifle with military spirit, and he raised thebridge of his nose delicately, turning to observe his instinctivecompanion.
"If it's any harm I won't ask it," the easy-going mariner spoke, "butair you two Cannons ary kin to ole Patty Cannon?"
Mr. Cannon smiled.
"In Adam all sinned--there we may have been connected," he said. "Thequestion you ask may one day be actionable, sir. The Cannons are anumerous people in our region, of fair substance, such as we have, butthey showed nothing to vary the equation of subsistence here till therearose the mother of Isaac and Jacob Cannon. She was a remarkable woman;unassisted, she procured the charter for Cannon's Ferry, and made theport settlement of that name by the importance her ferry acquired; andwhen she died there were found in her house nine hundred dollars insilver--for she never would take any paper money--the earnings of thatsequestered ferry, to start her sons on their career. She knew thepeculiar character of some of her neighbors--how lightly _meum_ and_tuum_ sat upon their fears or consciences--but she kept no guard excepther own good gray eyes and dauntless heart over that accumulating pileof little sixpences, for there was but one spirit as bold as she in allthis region of the world--"
"And that, I reckon," observed Jimmy Phoebus, "was ole Patty Cannonherself."
Mr. Jacob Cannon slightly bowed his head, and spoke aloud from an innercommunion:
"Forgive me, mother, that I make the comparison! Thy frugal oil, thatburned with pure and lonely widow's flame at Cannon's Ferry window, thetraveller hailed with comfort in his heart, and blessed the enterprise.But to compound the equation another unknown quantity of female forcearose beside my mother's lamp. A certain young Cannon, distantly of ourstock, must needs go see the world, and he returned with a fair demon ofa bride, and settled, too, at Cannon's Ferry. He lived to see thewondrous serpent he had warmed in his arms, and died, they say, of thesting. But she lived on, and, shrinking back into the woods to a littlefarm my mother's sons rented to her, she lighted there aJack-o'-the-lantern many a traveller has pursued who never returned totell. With Ebenezer Johnson's progeny and her own siren sisters, whofollowed Madame Cannon to the Nanticoke, the nucleus of a settlementbegan, and has existed for twenty years, that only the Almighty's_venire facias_ can explore."[2]
"That's my arrand, Jacob Cannon," quietly remarked Jimmy Phoebus. "I'ma pore man from Prencess Anne. If you took me for a nigger-dealer youdid me as pore a compliment as when I asked if you was Patty Cannon'skin. But I have got just one gal to love and just one life to lose, an'if God takes me thar, I'm a-goin' to Johnson's Cross-roads."
Mr. Jacob Cannon turned and examined his companion with some twinklingcare, but showed no personal concern.
"Every man must be his own security, my dark-skinned friend, till he canfind a bailsman. That place I never take--neither the debtor's nor thesecurity. The firm of Isaac and Jacob Cannon allows no trespass, andfurther concern themselves not. But we are at the Nanticoke."
"I'm obliged to you for the lift, Mr. Jacob Cannon," said Jimmy,springing down, "and hope you may never find it inconvenient to have letsuch a pack of wolves use your neighborhood to trespass on human natur."