CHAPTER XXXVI.

TWO WHIGS.

"Goy! Look at the trees, friend Custis," said John M. Clayton, standing

before his office as the rising sun innocently struck the tree-tops in

the public square of Dover.

Judge Custis, sitting at an upper window, observed that many noble elms

and locusts had been riven by lightning, or torn by wind and wind-driven

floods of rain.

"What a night!" Custis exclaimed; "the jail burned, the lightning

appalling, and I thought I heard firearms, too."

Judge Custis heard Clayton say, as he entered the room:

"So ole Derrick Molleston, Aunt Braner, asked you about my dinner, did

he? And it's Bill Greenley that burned the jail? Goy! And the black

people licked the kidnappers at Cowgill House?"

"Dat dey did, praise de Lord!" ejaculated Aunt Braner, fervently.

Clayton turned to a young man at the table, now dressed in a good clean

suit of clothes, and said, as the old cook left the room:

"Now, friend Dennis, tell your tale. Goy!"

The boy, whom the Judge was startled to recognize, at once began:

"Jedge Custis, the kidnapper man you left in the kitchen has stole Aunt

Hominy and your little niggers. They was at Johnson's Cross-roads last

night. Maybe they's gone before this. My boat was hired to take 'em off,

and I had to come along, but I run away from the band and give warnin'

last night to Mr. Clayton yer."

Before the Judge could reply, Clayton exclaimed,

"Now, Brother Custis, permit me now! Let my noble old constituent and

fellow-Whig, Jonathan Hunn, resume!"

"Friend," spoke out a wiry, lean, healthy-skinned man, "this young man

surprised me last night with intelligence that thy Maryland friends were

marching on the very capital of Delaware, to steal men. I was out in the

road at that late hour for another Christian purpose, and the Lord

rewarded me with this good one: I brought friend Dennis to John

Clayton's back door, and he lent us all his firearms. At the little

brick grocery of William Parke, just beyond the Cowgill House--where I

am told he sells ardent liquors to negroes contrary to law, and so takes

the name among them of 'Kind Parke'--I found several of our free

Delaware negroes, I fear on no good errand. So I remarked, 'If William

Parke, contrary to law, has been selling thee brandy out of an eggshell,

as if he knew not the contents, I shall pay him to repeat the vile

enticement quickly, for ye who are of the world must fight this night.'"

"Goy!" said Clayton, warming up; "Quakers will set other people on,

won't they? Goy!"

"Other gunpowder arms were there procured, and we barricaded Cowgill

House so as to make it at once a decoy and a hornet's nest. I despise

war and men of war so much that I have somewhat studied their campaigns,

and I suggested, friend Clayton, that the stairway was a good tactical

defensive position--is that the vain term?--to send a volley out the

main door, and a flank fire on every door and window on the sides of

Cowgill's hall. It also commanded the back yard by a window on the

staircase. A door beneath the staircase was barricaded. There was a

festival, or feast, given that night, by absent friend Cowgill's

permission, by these Dover folks of color. I would not wonder if it was

designed or discovered by these scoundrels on thy line of states, friend

Custis. I told the men-at-arms to leave their huzzies all below in the

feasting-hall till the attack began, and then to let them escape up the

stairway, and to defend that stair like sinful men. But first a negro

spy knocked on the door, and a loop was thrown over his neck, and two of

the black boys gagged him. Then the attack was made, and, at my order,

all the lights were put out."

"Oh, Jedge," Levin Dennis broke in, "it was short and dreadful! Captain

Van Dorn had got to the bottom of the stairs, when the niggers half-way

up fired over his head and shot mos' everything down. The Quaker man yer

then pinioned the captain an' dropped him, wounded, out of the high

window. I pity Van Dorn, but _he_ says that he's in a bad business. I

hope he ain't dead."

"Who is this Van Dorn?" asked Judge Custis. "I've heard of such a

dare-devil, but he has never pestered Princess Anne."

"I ran and hid in the deep eaves of the garret story," Levin continued,

"which is built in like closets, and the wasps there, coming in to suck

the blossoms on the vines that has growed up through the eaves from

outside, flew around in the dark among the yaller gals that was a-hidin'

and a-prayin', and never feelin' the wasps sting em', thinkin' about

them kidnappers. I reckon, gen'lemen, the kidnappers will never come to

Dover no more."

"Two things surprise me," Clayton said; "that Joe Johnson would venture

to raid Dover itself after the licking I got him; and that free darkeys

could make such a defence."

"Ah! John Clayton," spoke Jonathan Hunn, "there was a white witness

there, to affirm that they only defended their lives."

"It was Captain Van Dorn that raided Dover," Levin spoke; "Joe Johnson

is a coward."

"Judge Custis," said Mr. Clayton, "you and I can save this peninsula, at

least, from the sectional excitements that are coming. You must

surrender to Delaware old Patty Cannon and her household. She now lives

on your side of the line. Come over to the Governor's office with me,

and I will get a requisition for her on the business of last night.

Young Dennis here knows the band; friend Hunn saw the attack."

Judge Custis's face grew suddenly troubled.

"Clayton," he said, "I would rather not appear in this matter. Indeed,

you must excuse me."

"What!" said Clayton; "hesitate to do a little thing like this, after

the free opinions you have expressed?"

There was a long, awkward pause. The Quaker arose, and, looking well at

Judge Custis, said:

"None but Almighty God knows the secrets of a slave-holder's mind. No

son of Adam is fit to be absolute over any human creature."

"Amen!" Judge Custis said, meekly.

* * * * *

The news from Princess Anne confirmed the loss of Vesta Custis's slaves.

Judge Custis was told to come home and take steps for their recovery,

but he was strangely apathetic. The day after the raid Levin Dennis

disappeared, Clayton only saying:

"Who would have thought that soft-eyed boy was already fascinated by

these kidnappers? He has taken his horse and gone back to Patty

Cannon's."

The suit against the Canal Company required a great deal of research, as

law-books were then scarce, and precedents for breaches of contract

against corporations were not many; this form of legal life being

comparatively modern in that day, like the dawn of the floral age, or

before megatheriums grazed above the trees or iguanodons swam in the

canals. Clayton and Custis walked and ate and lay down together,

comparing knowledge and suggestions, and the litigious mind of John

Randel, Junior, was rather irritating to both of them, so that, to be

rid of his society in Dover, the two lawyers, meantime supplied with

money by Meshach Milburn's draft, resolved to visit the canal, which was

distant about thirty miles.

The three men started together in a carriage, after breakfast, on a soft

yet frosty morning, such as often gives to this region a winter sparkle

and mildness like the Florida climate. They passed several tidal creeks,

as the Duck and the Little Duck, the Blackbird and the Apoquinimink,

and, as they advanced, the barns became larger, the hedges more tasteful

and trimmed like those in the French Netherlands, the leafless peach

orchards stretched out like the tea-plants in China. Two or three little

towns studded the roadside, the woods gave way altogether to smaller

farms, and, at a steep bottom called the Fiddler's Bridge, they turned

across the fields to an old four-chimneyed, galleried mansion, at the

end of a long lane, and near a great stagnant pond, where John Randel,

Junior, as he fully named himself on every occasion, had a fine dinner

spread.

After dinner they launched upon the stream in a row and sail boat, to

Mr. Clayton's trepidation, and bore out through acres of splutter-docks,

and muskrats and terrapins unnumbered, and many wild-fowl, to the

Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, which extended for several miles through

a mighty pond or feeder, like a ditch within a bayou.

The negro rower tied their boat behind a passing vessel, which towed

them out to the locks at the Delaware River, at a point opposite a

willowy island, and where an embryo "city" had been started in the

marshes, and there they waited for the packet from Philadelphia. Mr.

Randel took his negro man, a person of sorrowful yet inexpressive

countenance, to be a kind of piano or model on which to play his fierce

gestures.

"Clayton," said he, sitting on a stone lock in the evening gloaming, "I

ought to have been a lawyer. Not that I am not the greatest theoretical

engineer in the country, but my legal genius interposes, and I sue the

villains who employ me."

Here he gave the melancholy negro a violent shaking, who took it as

stolidly as a bottle of medicine shaken by the doctor.

"Yes, you sued Judge Ben Wright and he nonsuited you."

"I tell you a new axiom, Clayton," the earnest engineer cried, putting

the negro down on his hams and sitting on him; "whoever employs genius

has to be a scoundrel. In the nature of their relations it is so. He

deflects genius from its full expression, absorbs the virtue from it,

and is a fraud."

Here he kicked the negro underneath him, who hardly protested.

"Well, then," spoke Judge Custis, "as Clayton is a man of genius, and

you employ him--"

"I'm a scoundrel, of course," Randel exclaimed. "His sense of law and

right must yield to my ideas. Now look at this canal! Had I not been

obliged to defer to the soulless corporation which employed me, I would

have dug it to the depth that the tides of the two bays would have

filled it, instead of damming up the creeks for feeders, and pumping

water into it by steam-pumps. Then the war-vessels of the country could

go through, and the channel would be purged by every tide."

He stood up and put his foot on the negro, to the amusement of the boys

gathering around.

"John Fitch, the engineer," said John M. Clayton, "left a curious will;

it begins, 'To William Rowan, my trusty friend, I bequeath my Beaver

Hat.'"

Judge Custis's countenance fell, thinking of another hat which had

entered his family.

The barge on which they embarked had numerous passengers, and soon came

to a small lock-town and turn-bridge, and, a few miles beyond, entered

upon a serious piece of work, leaving the trough of a creek, of which

the canal had previously availed itself, and cutting through the low

ridge of the peninsula, which, to Judge Custis, seemed almost

mountainous. He was of that patriotic opulence, just short of

imagination, which rejoiced in public works, and this little canal, only

fourteen miles long, was, with two or three exceptions, the only

achieved work in the Union, turnpikes and bridges omitted. Built by the

national government, by three of the states it connected, and by private

subscription, it had involved two and a quarter million dollars of

expense--no light burden when the population was, by the previous

census, less than eight million whites in all the land.

Judge Custis's family troubles faded from his mind as he looked up at

the deep cutting, nearly seventy feet in height of banks, with sands of

yellow and green, and stains of iron and strata of marl, some of which

had fallen back into the excavation and threatened the navigation again;

and, when he saw a bridge, called the Buck, leap the chasm ninety feet

overhead, by a span that then seemed sublimity itself, he touched

Clayton and said:

"Never mind my failures! Thank God, I'm a Whig."

"Goy! there's nothing like it," said Clayton.

Not far from this point the canal passed an old church and graveyard at

a bridge where Mr. Clayton said his namesake, the revolutionary Governor

of Delaware, was buried. Here Randel's plain conveyance took them in,

and in the moonlight they drove a few miles to Mr. Randel's estate, near

the banks of a river, under a long table-mountain of barren clay and

iron stain, on the farther shore.

"Here," said Randel, "is my future estate of Randalia. Here I shall see

all the commerce of the canal passing by, and garnishee every vessel

that pays my tolls to the Canal Company."

"Randel," asked Mr. Clayton, "what were those stakes I saw some distance

back, running north and south across the fields?"

"A railroad survey."

"Who is making it?"

"They say Meshach Milburn, of Princess Anne."

"Goy!" exclaimed Clayton, "I'll beat him."

* * * * *

For two or three days the three men, still studying the canal suit,

drove over a picturesque country, visiting the old manor of the

Labadists and their Bohemian patron, Augustine Herman, the homestead of

the late treaty minister, Bayard, and the ancient Welsh Baptist churches

among the hills of the Elk and Christiana, where some of Cromwell's

warriors lay. It was the favorite land of Whitefield, and in the

neighborhood was an iron furnace Judge Custis examined with melancholy

interest, as one of the investments of General Washington's father more

than a hundred years before, when the Indians made the iron. They also

went to Turkey Point, where the British army was disembarked to capture

Philadelphia, and Knyphausen's division obliterated the history of

Delaware by carrying her records away from Newcastle. Returning from one

of these pleasant journeys, two messages from different points seared

Judge Custis's eyeballs:

"Your wife died at Cambridge." "Your daughter is very ill at

Wilmington."

"To Wilmington!" cried Judge Custis, staggering up. "Oh, my daughter! I

have killed her."