CHAPTER XLIV.

THE DEATH OF PATTY CANNON.

As Patty Cannon came out of the tavern the cross-roads were full of

people, taking their last look at the spot where she had triumphed for

nearly twenty years.

None thought to look at Van Dorn, nor ask what had become of him, and

his friend Sorden removed his body, unseen, to a spot in the pine woods,

where his unmarked grave was dug, and standing round it were three

mourners only, and Sorden said the final words with homely tears:

"I loved him as I never loved A male."

The Maryland constable marched Patty Cannon down to the little bridge of

planks where ran the ditch nearly on the State line, and tradition still

believes the figment that Joe Johnson at that moment was hiding beneath

it.

There, driven across the boundary like some borderer's cow, the queen of

the kidnappers was seized by the Delaware constable, and placed in a

small country gig-wagon, and, followed by a large mounted posse, the

road was taken to the little hamlet of Seaford, five miles distant.

She watched the small funereal cedars and monumental poplar-trees rise

strangled from the underbrush, the dark-brown streams flowing into inky

mill-ponds, the close, small pines, scarcely large enough to moan, but

trying to do so in a baby tone, and her eyes turned to the sand, where

she was soon to be. Not agony nor repentance nor any hope of escape

fluttered her cold heart, but only a feeling of being ungratefully

deserted by her friends, and ill-treated by her equals and neighbors,

who had so seldom warned or avoided her; no preacher had come to tell

her the naked gospel, and some had bowed to her respectfully, and even

begged her oats, and made subscriptions from her ill-gotten silver.

Seaford was a sandy place upon a bluff of the Nanticoke, and, as the

procession came in, a party of surveyors, working for Meshach Milburn's

railroad, paused to jeer the old kidnapper. She had grown suddenly old,

and never raised her voice, that had always been so forward, to make a

reply.

The magistrate, Dr. John Gibbons, had been an educated young Irishman

who landed from a ship at Lewes, and, marrying a lady in Maryland, near

Patty Cannon's, became the legal spirit of the little town. His office,

a mere cabin, on a corner by his house, being too small for the purpose,

the examination was adjourned to the tavern, at the foot of the hill,

near where a mill-pond brook dug its way to the Nanticoke. Around the

tavern some box-bush walks were made in the sand, and willow-trees

bordered the cold river-side, and, at pauses in the hearing, wild-fowl

were heard to play and pipe in the falling tide.

The evidence of Cy James and other cowardly companions in her sins was

quickly given, and the procession started through the woods and sands to

Georgetown, twelve miles to the eastward, where Patty Cannon was

received by all the town, waiting up for her, and the jail immediately

closed her in.

* * * * *

"I didn't ezackly make out what that cymlin-headed feller did it fur,"

Jimmy Phoebus remarked, in the hold of an old oyster pungy, where he

found himself with his mulatto friend and Aunt Hominy and the children,

"but the file he fetched me has done its work at last. Yer, Whatcoat,"

addressing his male fellow-prisoner, "take this knife the same feller

slipped me, an' cut these cords." Standing up free again, Mr. Phoebus

further remarked,

"Whatcoat, thar's two of us yer. By smoke! thar's three."

The docile colored man opened his eyes.

"Him!" exclaimed the sailor, indicating the feather-bed in the hold,

with its stiff, invisible contents; "Joe'll chuck him overboard down yer

about deep water somewhere. Now, for a little hokey-pokey; I think I'll

git in thar myself, an' let Joe sell t'other feller fur a nigger."

Phoebus's power over his fellow-prisoners--little children and idiotic

Hominy included--was now perfect, and he began to explore the rotten old

hold, which contained oyster-rakes, fish-lines, and the usual utensils

of a dredging-vessel, and soon discovered that there could be made a

clear passage to crawl through her from forecastle to-cabin by removing

a few boards.

"Yer, Hominy," he said, "get to work with your needle, old gal; I'm

goin' to take you home."

* * * * *

With a good start, and a fair wind and slack tide, Johnson was off

Vienna at eight o'clock.

"Ten mile to go, an' they can't catch me with a racehorse," he said,

"after I pass Chicacomico wharf, an' git abaft the marshes. I'm boozy

fur sleep. Thar's two in this crew I don't know, and I must be helmsman.

Bingavast! I'll make my nigger work his passage."

He walked to the hatchway over the hold, and, sliding it back, dropped

in, and, with a few expert blows of the professional smithy, set

Whatcoat free, merely glancing where Phoebus lay upon his face,

snoring hard.

"Cool cucumber of a bloke," Johnson said, "he'll be too much fur me in a

trade; I'll have to stifle him!" Then, ordering the mulatto man astern,

Johnson gave him the tiller, and sat near, nodding, till the second

wharf on the starboard was passed.

"Now Gabriel can't overhaul me," Johnson exclaimed; "thar's no more road

on the Dorchester side, an' the Somerset roads is all gashed by creeks

an' barred by farm-gates. I'll sink that dab an' stiffy."

He called two deck hands, and lifted the body out of the hold. Phoebus

still placidly slept upon his face, and Johnson looked at him with

peculiar envy after a hurried glance at the dead. Some ropes being put

around the bed, and drag-irons attached to them, the whole weight was

unceremoniously thrown overboard at the point of Hungry Neck, and the

dealer remarked, apologetically:

"There goes a great hypocrite, gentlemen; he wasn't above piracy, ef he

could git another man to fly the black flag for him. I reckon he'll be

'conservative' enough after this. And now I'll snooze. Steer her for

Ragged Point, yonder, Whatcoat, an' when you git thar wake me. It's

clear broad inlet all the way; an' remember, nigger, I sleep and shoot,

on hair triggers!"

With his pistols in his hand, Johnson lay down in the cabin a few feet

from the helmsman, and tried to see and sleep at once. He had been

without rest for many nights, and sleep soon bound him in its own clevis

and manacles.

When he awoke, so deep had been his slumber that he could not recall for

a moment where he was. The tiller was unmanned, the stars shone in the

cabin hatchway, a cold bilge-water draft blew through the old hulk, and,

as he dragged himself up the steps, he saw tall woods near by, and heard

the voice of solemn pines.

The vessel was aground; wild geese were making jubilant shrieks as they

cut the water with their fleecy wings, like cameo engraving; the outlaw

gazed and gazed, and finally muttered:

"Deil's Island, or I'm a billy noodle! I run from it the last time I was

yer, an' my blood runs cold to be yer agin; my daddy got his curse from

this camp-meetin'."

Taking speed from his apprehensions, Johnson slid back the hatchway and

leaped into the hold, starlight and moonlight following him, and nothing

did they reveal there except one man, peacefully sleeping upon his face,

as Phoebus had last been seen.

The kidnapper shook his captive, but he did not awaken. He turned the

man over, and there met his eyes the cold blue stare and Roman nose and

bleeding lips of Allan McLane, apparently returned from the bottom of

the river.

With a shriek, the outlaw bounded upon the deck and ran to the bow of

the pungy.

"Help me!" came a faint cry from the forecastle, and, peeping in, Joe

Johnson recognized one of his own familiars he had shipped at Cannon's

Ferry, gagged, like his companion, and tied fast. The man had just been

able to articulate.

"Now, spiflicate me!" spoke the skipper, relieving the man, "the ruffian

cly you! who did this?"

"The white nigger did it all, Joe. He crawled through the stays to the

cabin, and got your pistols, first; leastways, we found him an' the

yaller feller at the helm on top of us, coming up the fo'castle, and

next t'other two men jined 'em. They said ole Samson had give 'em the

wink. We two was tied and throwed in yer, an' ef you had awaked, thar

was a man to stab you to the heart, sot over you."

"The portmanteau?" cried Johnson.

"That's gone, I reckon. They sowed you up a feather an' oyster-shell man

on a plank to heave overboard; that's what they said. They steered for

Deil's Island, an' sot the Island Parson yer to watch that you don't git

the pungy off, an' I reckon they're half-way to Princess Anne."

Joe Johnson heard no more. He released his creatures from their bonds,

took the dead body in the pungy's canoe, and gave the command:

"Row fur the open bay! We'll strike St. Mary's County or Virginny.

Bingavast! Hike! Never agin will I put foot on this Eastern Shore."

* * * * *

At Georgetown Jimmy Phoebus, Samson, and Levin Dennis met again, and

Levin told the mystery of his father's disappearance.

"Never tell your mother, Levin, that Captain Dennis died in that

Pangymonum; it would break her heart, and she never would trust man

agin."

"Jimmy," spoke up Samson, "let her understand that he got wrecked on the

_Ida_. It looks a little bad, but the slave-trade sounds better than

kidnappin'."

"They say that Allan McLane owned that slave vessel," Phoebus put in;

"but he didn't live to know his loss. He'll meet his heathens at the

Judgment Seat."

"Who has fed mother?" Levin asked. "Hulda can't explain that."

"I kin, Levin," Samson Hat said, bashfully. "It was me. Good ole Meshach

Milburn, that everybody's down on, pitied that pore woman, an' made me

set things she needed in her window. He said if I ever told it he'd

discharge me."

"Dog my skin!" Jimmy Phoebus observed, "the next man that calls

'steeple top' after ole Meshach I'll mash flat! But, come, my son, I've

buried at Broad Creek your wife's family relics. We'll hire a wagon, and

drive to ole Broad Creek 'piscopal church on the way, and there I'll

have you married to Huldy."

The sword-hilt and coins were disinterred, and in that ancient edifice

of hard pine, where the worship of her English race had long been

celebrated, the naval officer's daughter became the wife of the son of

his voluptuous and perverted friend. As Jimmy Phoebus kissed them he

said:

"Levin, when your mother says 'Yes,' all four of us will settle in the

West. Illinois has become a free state, after a hard fight, and I reckon

that'll suit us."

* * * * *

For a while Patty Cannon, by her affability and sorrow, had easy times

in jail, and was allowed to eat with the jailer's family; but, as the

examination proceeded before the grand jury, and her menials hastened to

throw their responsibility in so many crimes upon her alone, an outer

opinion demanded that she be treated more harshly, and some of the irons

she had manacled upon her captives were riveted upon her own ankles.

Very soon dropsy began to appear in her legs and feet, and, after it

became evident to her that neither money nor friends were forthcoming in

her defence, she fell into a passive despair.

The frequent conferences between Jimmy Phoebus and Cy James led to the

belief that not only had Hulda recovered portions of her father's money

and valuables, hidden in the beehives and flower-pots old Patty had so

assiduously attended, but that Phoebus had seized upon property

indicated by the informer, and was to have whatever remained of it after

procuring the latter's release.

This result was hastened by Patty Cannon's death, which happened, to the

great relief of many respectably considered people in that region, who

had feared from the first that she would make a minute confession,

implicating everybody who had dealt with her band.

Among these was Judge Custis, who opened his skeleton-in-the-closet to

John M. Clayton one spring-like day. Clayton had quietly prodded on the

conviction of Patty Cannon, but the jealousy of the slaveholding

interest made him wary of any open appearance against her.

They were sitting in the little parlor of the Methodist parsonage, a

small frame house with a conical-roofed portico and big end-chimney, a

little off from the public square, whither they had gone to send the

pastor to wait on the aged Chancellor, who had been taken ill in the

court-room, and lay in the hotel.

"Clayton," said Judge Custis, in a low tone of voice, "what this woman

may do or tell, you would not think concerned me, but I will show you

how deep her influence has reached, as well as explain to you why I

would not pursue my own servants to her den. In this I humiliate myself

before you, as I must do, if I am to become your client."

"You had been trading with Patty Cannon; I guessed that much."

"Such was the case. When I was a collegian at Yale, returning home one

holiday, I fell in love with a beautiful quadroon, the property of my

uncle, in Northampton County. She was an elegant woman, with a good

education, and had been my playmate. I was ardent and good-looking, and

easily found lodgment in her heart; but the conquest of her charms was

long, and agonizing with sincere esteem. You must believe me when I

declare that I fell dangerously ill because I was refused by her, and,

making a confidant of my doctor, he told the girl that she must choose

between my death and her surrender. Pity, then, prevailed, even over

religion. I was happy in every point but one--the injury concealment

worked upon her self-respect; for, Clayton, my mistress was my own

cousin."

"Goy!"

"I never desired to marry, although no children had been born in my

patriarchal relation; but, in the course of years, my uncle became

pressed for debts, and he appealed to me to save my beautiful handmaiden

from sale, he being in full sympathy with my relation to her, because

she was his daughter."

"I goy!"

"The case was urgent. I possessed some negroes, the legacy of my mother.

To sell them publicly would be a stigma both upon my humanity and my

credit. I adopted the cowardly device of letting a kidnapper slip them

away, and take a large commission for his trouble. I saved my lady, but

at the expense of a secret."

"And that secret Joe Johnson depended on, Custis, when he was suddenly

driven into your house, and found your old servant already demoralized

by the announcement of your son-in-law?"

"The scoundrel pressed his advantage; and he saw, besides, my

daughter--not Vesta, but her half-sister, Virgie--and, between his

persecution of her and my brother-in-law's vindictiveness, poor Virgie

was literally run to the ground and into it; she is in her grave."

Judge Custis broke into a long fit of sobbing, and Clayton, who had

noticed his dejected mien since their separation, passed an arm around

him, saying:

"Never mind, now! Never mind, old friend! Johnson is fled; McLane, they

whisper, has never been seen since he entered Johnson's tavern. His will

was found there, and your daughter gets her mother's property and

servants back."

"I must finish my story," Judge Custis said, stanching his tears. "By

the decline of every family with natural feelings and refinement, under

what Mr. Pinkney termed 'the contaminating curse of reluctant bondsmen,'

we, also, became poor. To save others, it was necessary that I must

marry, and get money by my own prostitution. My God, how we are repaid!

A bride was found for me in Baltimore, the sister of Allan McLane, and a

beauty.

"I began my married life with the best intentions; my poor mistress

herself advised me to turn to my wife, and become a true man. She told

me so with her heart breaking. In heaven, where she dwells with my poor

child, she hears me now, and knows I speak the truth!"

Judge Custis broke down again, and leaned his convulsed head on

Clayton's tender breast, whose own widower's grief gushed forth

responsively.

"Children were born in Teackle Hall; my servitude was becoming adjusted

to me, when Allan McLane, in his love of vindictiveness and of low,

formal respectability, conceived that my poor quadroon required some

chastisement for having been his sister's rival, and he set a trap to

buy her. I was forced to have her bought, to protect her, and to bring

her to my care again, and thus our passion was revived, and, giving

birth to Virgie, she died. Reared together, and unconscious of their

kindred, those daughters loved each other as dearly as when, in heaven,

they shall hide in the radiance of each other, and cover my sins with

their angelic wings."

"Rise up, old friend!" cried Clayton; "your transgressions are, at

least, washed out in sincere tears. Hear the birds all around us loving

and condoning, and filling the air with praise. Come out!"

As they stepped upon Georgetown Square they saw John Randel, Jr.,

leading a party of surveyors to locate the opposition railroad to

Meshach Milburn's. These and many others were pressing towards the

whipping-post and pillory, in the rear of the court-house, where stood,

exposed by the sheriff, the cleanly mulatto woman who had entertained

Virgie in Snow Hill the first night of her flight.

"This free woman, Priscilla Hudson," cried the sheriff, "is to stand one

hour in the pillory for the crime of lending her pass to a slave. Thirty

lashes she was sentenced to, the Governor has graciously taken off. She

is to be sold, out of the state, at the end of one hour, for the term of

her natural life, to the highest bidder."

The poor woman stood there, bare armed and bare almost to the bosom,

delicate and lovely to see, and the mother of free children, her

clothing having been partly removed before the pardon of the stripes was

announced to her.

Her head and arms were thrust through the holes in one leaf of the

pillory, and thus, thrown forward, her modesty was exposed to the wanton

gaze of the crowd, while, on the other side of the same elevated

platform, pilloried in like manner, was a female chicken-thief,

impudent, indifferent, and chewing tobacco, and spitting it out upon the

pillory floor.

As Clayton and Custis saw this scene on their way to the tavern, an egg,

thrown from a window of the debtor's jail, whether meant for Mrs. Hudson

or not, struck her in the face, and its corrupt contents streamed down

her white and shivering breast.

"Shame! shame!" cried the people, as they saw the woman cry, and, gazing

up to the jail window, another female face appearing there, turned

their cries to curses:

"Hang her! hang her!"

For the last time in life Patty Cannon's bold and comely face swelled

again with passionate blood to the roots of the glossy black hair, and

the few who saw her rich, dark eyes, inflamed with anger, say their

pupils were dilated like the wild-cat's. She was gone in a moment, and

the sheriff had wiped Mrs. Hudson's face and breast with a handkerchief

passed up by a colored woman.

Two men were now actively going around the crowd, hat in hand,

soliciting contributions to buy the woman, the first a blind man, whose

eyes were bandaged, and a white man led him, calling loudly:

"The abolitionists have raised three hundred dollars to buy this woman's

freedom. We want a hundred more, as some mean people may bid her up

high. This man, her husband, stole her pass, to slip a friend away. We

couldn't git the evidence in, but it's God's truth, gentlemen! The

woman's nursed my wife, an' done a heap of good; and she come here, of

her own free will, out of Maryland, to nurse the Chancellor."

Little money was raised in that crowd, since there was little to give,

and, addressing the two distinguished strangers, Sorden, the crier,

exclaimed:

"What, gentlemen, will you let the Hunn brothers and Tommy Garrett and

the Motts give three hundred dollars for a woman they never saw, and we,

who see her always doing good, give nothing?"

"Pity! pity!" sobbed the blind man. "I'm burned so bad nobody will buy

_me_, but I stole her pass to help a slave off that I fell in love

with."

Judge Custis left Clayton's side, and waited till the hour in the

pillory was done, and, after a fierce contest, saw Sorden come off

victorious at the sale, though it took every dollar the Judge could

raise in Georgetown on his private credit.

"What is the name of the girl you gave her pass to?" asked the Judge of

the blind mulatto.

"Virgie, marster."

"My heart told me so," exclaimed the Judge. "Your crime has been

punished enough. I will send you to your wife."[15]

* * * * *

John Randel, Jr., observed, that evening:

"Devil Jim Clark has taken example from Patty Cannon, and squared the

circle."

"Not dead?" asked Clayton.

"Yes, dead and buried. He was cleaning up his contract on the canal, and

mistook the white Irish laborers there for kidnapped niggers. They set

on him, and beat him and scared him together, so that he never

recovered. They say he was 'converted' on his death-bed; or, as the

saying is, 'he died triumphantly;' but the darkeys report that the devil

came straight down with a chariot and drove him off."

"That fellow, Whitecar, I'm reserving," said Clayton, "to punish when I

can use him to sustain an argument in favor of admitting negro testimony

in kidnapping cases.[16] Without that admission, these kidnappers cannot

be convicted: even Patty Cannon here may escape us, though she has

killed white men."

Sorden spoke up, he being of the party:

"A disease called leprosy has broke out in ole Derrick Molleston's

cabin; Sam Ogg has got it, too, and they say he fetched it up from the

breakwater. Nobody will go near them. Black Dave is dead; he said he

killed a man at Prencess Anne: the young wife of Levin Dennis, who

turns out to be a lady, stayed and prayed with him to the last, and he

went off humble and happy. But, my skin! another kidnapper has rented

Johnson's tavern a'ready."

"The railroad will clear all these evils out," exclaimed Randel. "I've

put it into poetry," and he began to recite:

"To dark Naswaddox forest fled

The murderer from the main,

And with the otter laid his head

Amid the swamp and cane:

'Here nothing can pursue my ear,

From travelled paths astray;

I shall forget, from year to year,

The world beyond the bay!'

"The hunted man one morning heard

A whistle near and strong,

And in the night a fiery light

The thickets flashed among:

The demon of the engine rushed

Along on blazing beams--

The hound the murderer had flushed,

The outlaw's path was Steam's!"

* * * * *

The cry of hate from the crowd around the whipping-post, as it awoke

Patty Cannon's last anger, also determined her last crime.

Fear was relative in her: she had neither the fear of men nor of shame,

and only of death as it involved a hereafter. Whether that hereafter was

a latent conviction in her mind, or the vivid admonition of guilt and

dead men's eyes peering over her dreams and into the silent, lonely

watches of haunted midnights, who shall tell? There is no analysis of a

native and ancient depravity: it was sown in the marrow, it strengthens

in the bone, and, with a cunning, daring self-assertion, gambles upon

the faith of living and of dying not. Its very fears push it onward in

crime, and make it cruelly tantalize its own fate, as cowards lean over

graveyard walls, and shout, with an inner trembling, "Come forth--I dare

you!"

So had this woman, conscious of her deserts, bullied eternal justice

through its long postponements, never doubting, while ever vexing, the

Spirit of God, until the number of her crimes crowded the tablet of her

memory, and out of the hideous gulf of her past life gazed faces without

names and deeds without memoranda; a procession the longer that

strangers were in it, and, shrinking from her, yet pressing on,

exclaimed her name or only shrieked "'Tis she!" as if her name was

nothing to her curse.

Sleeping in her chains, there were children's eyes watching her from

far-off corners, as if to say, "Give us the whole life we would have

lived but for you!"

As her swollen limbs festered to the irons, there were babies' cries

floating in the air, that seemed to draw near her breasts, as if for

food, and suddenly convulse there in screams of pain, and move away with

the sounds of suffocation she had heard as they expired.

All night there were callers on her, and whom they were no one could

tell; but the jailer's family saw her lips moving and her eyes consult

the air, as if she was faintly trying bravado upon certain

business-speaking ghosts who had come with bills long overdue and

demanded payment, and went out only to come again and again.

Some of these mystic visitors she would jeer at and defy, and stamp her

feet, as if they had no rights in equity against her soul, having been

on vicious errands when they met their ends, and bankrupts in the court

of pity; but suddenly a helpless something would appear, and paralyze

her with its little wail, like a babeless mother or a motherless babe,

and, with her forehead wet with sweat of agony, she would affect to

chuckle, and would whisper, "Nothin' but niggers! nothin' more!"

Day brought her some relief, but also other cares, and of these the

chief was the care of money. She had been a spendthrift all her life,

and robbed mankind of life and liberty to enjoy the selfish dissipation

of spending their blood-money; and what had she bought with it? Nothing,

nothing. To spend it, only, she had wrecked her sex and her soul; to

spend it for such trifles as children want--candy and common ornaments,

a dance and a treat, a gift for some boor or forester or even negro she

was misleading, or to establish a silly reputation for generosity:

generous at the expense of human happiness, and of robbing people of

liberty and life, merely for spending-money!

Now she had none to appease the all-devouring greeds of habit

intensified by real necessity: no money to buy dainties or even liquor;

no money to spend upon the jailer's family and keep the reputation of

kindness alive; no money for decent apparel to appear in court; none to

corrupt the law or to hire witnesses and attorneys.

The two demons she had created alternately seized the day and the night:

the demon of money plagued her all day, the demon of murder pursued her

all night.

Every morning she had insatiate wants; all night she had remorseless

visitors; and, close before, the gallows filled the view, with the Devil

tying the noose.

That Devil she plainly saw, so busy on the gallows, fitting his ropes

and shrouds and long death-caps, and he evaded her, as if he had no

commerce with her now.

He was a cool and wistful man, perfectly happy in the prospect of

getting her, and not anxious about it, so sure was he of her soon and

complete possession.

He was always out in the jail-yard when she looked there, fixing his

ropes, sliding the nooses, examining the gallows, like a conscientious

carpenter; and in his complacent smile was an awful terror that froze

her dumb: he seemed so impersonal, so joyous, so industrious, as if he

had waited for her like a long creditor, and compounded the interest on

her sins till the infernal sum made him a millionaire in torments.

A Devil it was, real as a man--a slavemaster to whose quiet love of

cruelty eternal death was not enough; a man whose unscarred age, old as

the rising sun, still came and went in immortal youthfulness and

satisfaction, but for the nonce forgetting other debtors in the grip he

had on her, as his majestic expiation for his own shortcomings.

He looked like a storekeeper, a man of accounts, a cosmopolitan

kidnapper, who knew a good article and had it now. She was so terrified

that she wanted to cry to him, and see if he would not remit that

business method and become more human, and sauce her back.

But no; the longer she watched, the less he looked towards her, though

she knew his smile meant no one else. To hang upon his cord was very

little; to go with him after it was stretched, down the burning grates

of hell, and see him all so cool and busy in her misery, was the gnawing

vulture at her heart.

In vain she tried to throw responsibility for her sins upon a vague,

false parentage and fatherhood, and say that she was bred to robbery and

vice; a something in her heart responded: "No, you had beauty and health

and chaste lovers whom you rejected or tempted, and a mind that was ever

clear and knew right from wrong. Conscience never gave you up, though

drenched in innocent blood. The often-murdered monitor revived and cried

aloud like the striking of a clock, but never was obeyed!"

Thus haunted, deserted, peeped in upon from the hereafter, racked with

vain needs, her outlets closed to every escape or subterfuge, revenge

itself dead, and disease assisting conscience to banish sleep, the

wretched woman crawled to her window one day and saw the helpless

effigy of her sex exposed there for doing an act of humanity; and

instantly an instinct she immediately obeyed exacted from her one last

familiar, heartless deed, to show the crowd that even she, Patty Cannon

the murderess, had "no respect for a nigger."

That doctrine long survived her, though she found it old when she came

among them.

She aimed an egg at the breast of her sex, and, with a barefaced grin,

she saw it strike and burst. The next moment the crowd had recognized

and defied her.

In the exasperation of their shout, and of being no longer praised even

for insulting a negro, a convulsion of desperate rage overcame the

murderess.

Too helpless to retort in any other way, yet in uncontrollable

recklessness, she exclaimed, "They never shall see me hang, then!" and

swallowed the arsenic she had concealed in her bosom.

That night she died in awful torments.

* * * * *

The venerable Chancellor, lying in the hotel near the whipping-post

corner, watched by the released Mrs. Hudson, who must to-morrow depart

from the state forever, heard that night voices on the square, saying:

"Patty Cannon's dead. They say she's took poison."

A mighty pain seized the Chancellor's heart, and the loud groans he made

called a stranger into the room.

"Is that dreadful woman dead?" sighed the Chancellor.

"Yes; she will never plague Delaware again, marster."

"God be thanked!" the old man groaned. "Justice and murder are kin no

more."

They said he died that instant of heart disease.