CHAPTER XXXVI.
TWO WHIGS.
"Goy! Look at the trees, friend Custis," said John M. Clayton, standingbefore his office as the rising sun innocently struck the tree-tops inthe public square of Dover.
Judge Custis, sitting at an upper window, observed that many noble elmsand locusts had been riven by lightning, or torn by wind and wind-drivenfloods of rain.
"What a night!" Custis exclaimed; "the jail burned, the lightningappalling, 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, didhe? And it's Bill Greenley that burned the jail? Goy! And the blackpeople 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 cleansuit 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 AuntHominy and your little niggers. They was at Johnson's Cross-roads lastnight. 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 andfellow-Whig, Jonathan Hunn, resume!"
"Friend," spoke out a wiry, lean, healthy-skinned man, "this young mansurprised me last night with intelligence that thy Maryland friends weremarching on the very capital of Delaware, to steal men. I was out in theroad at that late hour for another Christian purpose, and the Lordrewarded me with this good one: I brought friend Dennis to JohnClayton's back door, and he lent us all his firearms. At the littlebrick grocery of William Parke, just beyond the Cowgill House--where Iam told he sells ardent liquors to negroes contrary to law, and so takesthe name among them of 'Kind Parke'--I found several of our freeDelaware negroes, I fear on no good errand. So I remarked, 'If WilliamParke, 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 vileenticement 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 CowgillHouse so as to make it at once a decoy and a hornet's nest. I despisewar and men of war so much that I have somewhat studied their campaigns,and I suggested, friend Clayton, that the stairway was a good tacticaldefensive position--is that the vain term?--to send a volley out themain door, and a flank fire on every door and window on the sides ofCowgill's hall. It also commanded the back yard by a window on thestaircase. A door beneath the staircase was barricaded. There was afestival, or feast, given that night, by absent friend Cowgill'spermission, by these Dover folks of color. I would not wonder if it wasdesigned or discovered by these scoundrels on thy line of states, friendCustis. I told the men-at-arms to leave their huzzies all below in thefeasting-hall till the attack began, and then to let them escape up thestairway, and to defend that stair like sinful men. But first a negrospy knocked on the door, and a loop was thrown over his neck, and two ofthe 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! CaptainVan Dorn had got to the bottom of the stairs, when the niggers half-wayup fired over his head and shot mos' everything down. The Quaker man yerthen pinioned the captain an' dropped him, wounded, out of the highwindow. I pity Van Dorn, but _he_ says that he's in a bad business. Ihope he ain't dead."
"Who is this Van Dorn?" asked Judge Custis. "I've heard of such adare-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 suckthe blossoms on the vines that has growed up through the eaves fromoutside, flew around in the dark among the yaller gals that was a-hidin'and a-prayin', and never feelin' the wasps sting em', thinkin' aboutthem kidnappers. I reckon, gen'lemen, the kidnappers will never come toDover no more."
"Two things surprise me," Clayton said; "that Joe Johnson would ventureto raid Dover itself after the licking I got him; and that free darkeyscould make such a defence."
"Ah! John Clayton," spoke Jonathan Hunn, "there was a white witnessthere, to affirm that they only defended their lives."
"It was Captain Van Dorn that raided Dover," Levin spoke; "Joe Johnsonis a coward."
"Judge Custis," said Mr. Clayton, "you and I can save this peninsula, atleast, from the sectional excitements that are coming. You mustsurrender to Delaware old Patty Cannon and her household. She now liveson 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, afterthe free opinions you have expressed?"
There was a long, awkward pause. The Quaker arose, and, looking well atJudge Custis, said:
"None but Almighty God knows the secrets of a slave-holder's mind. Noson 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 Dennisdisappeared, Clayton only saying:
"Who would have thought that soft-eyed boy was already fascinated bythese kidnappers? He has taken his horse and gone back to PattyCannon's."
The suit against the Canal Company required a great deal of research, aslaw-books were then scarce, and precedents for breaches of contractagainst corporations were not many; this form of legal life beingcomparatively modern in that day, like the dawn of the floral age, orbefore megatheriums grazed above the trees or iguanodons swam in thecanals. Clayton and Custis walked and ate and lay down together,comparing knowledge and suggestions, and the litigious mind of JohnRandel, Junior, was rather irritating to both of them, so that, to berid of his society in Dover, the two lawyers, meantime supplied withmoney by Meshach Milburn's draft, resolved to visit the canal, which wasdistant about thirty miles.
The three men started together in a carriage, after breakfast, on a softyet frosty morning, such as often gives to this region a winter sparkleand 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 tastefuland trimmed like those in the French Netherlands, the leafless peachorchards stretched out like the tea-plants in China. Two or three littletowns studded the roadside, the woods gave way altogether to smallerfarms, and, at a steep bottom called the Fiddler's Bridge, they turnedacross the fields to an old four-chimneyed, galleried mansion, at theend 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 dinnerspread.
After dinner they launched upon the stream in a row and sail boat, toMr. Clayton's trepidation, and bore out through acres of splutter-docks,and muskrats and terrapins unnumbered, and many wild-fowl, to theChesapeake and Delaware Canal, which extended for several miles througha mighty pond or feeder, like a ditch within a bayou.
The negro rower tied their boat behind a passing vessel, which towedthem out to the locks at the Delaware River, at a point opposite awillowy island, and where an embryo "cit
y" had been started in themarshes, and there they waited for the packet from Philadelphia. Mr.Randel took his negro man, a person of sorrowful yet inexpressivecountenance, to be a kind of piano or model on which to play his fiercegestures.
"Clayton," said he, sitting on a stone lock in the evening gloaming, "Iought to have been a lawyer. Not that I am not the greatest theoreticalengineer in the country, but my legal genius interposes, and I sue thevillains who employ me."
Here he gave the melancholy negro a violent shaking, who took it asstolidly 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, puttingthe negro down on his hams and sitting on him; "whoever employs geniushas to be a scoundrel. In the nature of their relations it is so. Hedeflects 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, andyou employ him--"
"I'm a scoundrel, of course," Randel exclaimed. "His sense of law andright must yield to my ideas. Now look at this canal! Had I not beenobliged to defer to the soulless corporation which employed me, I wouldhave dug it to the depth that the tides of the two bays would havefilled it, instead of damming up the creeks for feeders, and pumpingwater into it by steam-pumps. Then the war-vessels of the country couldgo 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 boysgathering around.
"John Fitch, the engineer," said John M. Clayton, "left a curious will;it begins, 'To William Rowan, my trusty friend, I bequeath my BeaverHat.'"
Judge Custis's countenance fell, thinking of another hat which hadentered his family.
The barge on which they embarked had numerous passengers, and soon cameto a small lock-town and turn-bridge, and, a few miles beyond, enteredupon a serious piece of work, leaving the trough of a creek, of whichthe canal had previously availed itself, and cutting through the lowridge of the peninsula, which, to Judge Custis, seemed almostmountainous. He was of that patriotic opulence, just short ofimagination, which rejoiced in public works, and this little canal, onlyfourteen miles long, was, with two or three exceptions, the onlyachieved work in the Union, turnpikes and bridges omitted. Built by thenational government, by three of the states it connected, and by privatesubscription, it had involved two and a quarter million dollars ofexpense--no light burden when the population was, by the previouscensus, less than eight million whites in all the land.
Judge Custis's family troubles faded from his mind as he looked up atthe deep cutting, nearly seventy feet in height of banks, with sands ofyellow and green, and stains of iron and strata of marl, some of whichhad fallen back into the excavation and threatened the navigation again;and, when he saw a bridge, called the Buck, leap the chasm ninety feetoverhead, by a span that then seemed sublimity itself, he touchedClayton 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 ata bridge where Mr. Clayton said his namesake, the revolutionary Governorof 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, nearthe banks of a river, under a long table-mountain of barren clay andiron stain, on the farther shore.
"Here," said Randel, "is my future estate of Randalia. Here I shall seeall the commerce of the canal passing by, and garnishee every vesselthat pays my tolls to the Canal Company."
"Randel," asked Mr. Clayton, "what were those stakes I saw some distanceback, 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 theLabadists and their Bohemian patron, Augustine Herman, the homestead ofthe late treaty minister, Bayard, and the ancient Welsh Baptist churchesamong the hills of the Elk and Christiana, where some of Cromwell'swarriors lay. It was the favorite land of Whitefield, and in theneighborhood was an iron furnace Judge Custis examined with melancholyinterest, as one of the investments of General Washington's father morethan a hundred years before, when the Indians made the iron. They alsowent to Turkey Point, where the British army was disembarked to capturePhiladelphia, and Knyphausen's division obliterated the history ofDelaware by carrying her records away from Newcastle. Returning from oneof these pleasant journeys, two messages from different points searedJudge Custis's eyeballs:
"Your wife died at Cambridge." "Your daughter is very ill atWilmington."
"To Wilmington!" cried Judge Custis, staggering up. "Oh, my daughter! Ihave killed her."
The Entailed Hat; Or, Patty Cannon's Times Page 38