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Plunging again into the mud nearly to his waist, Phoebus pulled the scow up into the woods, and had barely concealed himself when he saw come out of the creek below Twiford's house a cat-boat like the Ellenora Dennis, and stand towards the island in the cripple.
It was only Jimmy Phoebus, thinking what he could say to punish this double traitor most, who had turned his back upon his race and upon gratitude, and Jimmy had remembered the poor woman chained to the tree on Twiford's island, and her oft-reiterated hymn; and the conclusion was flashed upon his mind that the mulatto wretch who decoyed her away and sold her was none other than his renegade fellow-prisoner, in turn made merchandise of because too dangerous to set at large in the probable hue-and-cry for her.
"Yes," cried Patty Cannon, "I do," and swore a man's oath. "Has the Señor 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."
"Joe," said Van Dorn, "what is to be your disposition of the prisoners we have?" "All goes with me to Norfolk but one, the nigger boxer; I burn him alive on Twiford's island. If the white chap is too pickle to sell, I'll throw him overboard; he ain't safe." "Ea! sus! it is boyish to burn the old lad. I have had many a blow from a black, and stab, too. A dog will bite you if you lasso him."
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.
The captain propped Samson up, and Joe Johnson glared into his face, and then struck him down with the handle of his heavy whip. "Patty," he growled, "that nigger's scienced; he's the champion scrapper of Somerset. He knocked me down, and I marked him fur it; and now, by God! I'm a-goin' to burn him alive on Twiford's island."
A boat of sufficient size, and crew to man it, had to be procured down the river, and this necessitated two journeys, one of Patty, to Cannon's Ferry, another by Joe, to Vienna and Twiford's wharf.
A beach led under the cover of a sandy bluff to the river gate of Twiford's comfortable house, and he boldly entered the lane and lawn, saying to himself: "I reckon a feller can ask to buy one squar meal a day in a free country, fur I'm hungry."
They had hardly gone four miles when a little, low-pitched town of small square houses, strewn about like toy-blocks between pairs of red outside chimneys, sat, in the soft, humid October morning, along the rim of a marshy creek that, skirting the hamlet, flowed into the Nanticoke River a few miles, by its course, above Twiford's wharf.
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.
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