NANTICOKE PEOPLE.
A map would be out of place in a story, yet there are probably some who
perceive that this is a story with a reality; and if such will take any
atlas and open it at the "Middle States" of the American republic, they
will see that the little State of Delaware is fitted as nicely into a
square niche of Maryland as if it were a lamp, or piece of statuary,
standing on a mantelpiece. It stands there on a mantelshelf about forty
miles wide, and rises to more than three times that height, making a
perfectly straight north and south line at right angles with its base.
Thus mortised into Maryland, its ragged eastern line is formed of the
Atlantic Ocean and the broad Delaware Bay.
The only considerable river within this narrow strip or _Hermes_ of a
state is the Nanticoke, which, like a crack in the wall,--and the same
blow fractured the image on the mantel,--flows with breadth and tidal
ebb and flow from the Chesapeake Bay through the Eastern Shore of
Maryland into Delaware, and is there formed of two tidal sources, the
one to the north continuing to be called the Nanticoke, and that to the
south--nearly as imposing a stream--named Broad Creek.
Nature, therefore, as if anticipating some foolish political boundaries
on the part of man, prepared one drain and channel of ingress at the
southwestern 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 the
afternoon of October, with the sun, an hour high in the west, shining
upon his dark, Greekish cheeks and neck, and he hearing the fall birds
whistle and cackle in the mellowing stubble and golden thickets.
The meadow-lark, the boy's delight, was picking seed, gravel, and
insects' eggs in the fields--large and partridge-like, with breast
washed yellow from the bill to the very knees, except at the throat,
where hangs a brilliant reticule of blackish brown; his head and back
are of hawkish colors--umber, brown, and gray--and in his carriage is
something of the gamecock. He flies high, sometimes alone, sometimes in
the flock, and is our winter visitor, loving the old fields improvidence
has 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 red
head, whose schoolmaster is the squirrel, and whose tactics of keeping a
tree between him and his enemy the Indian fighters adopted. He mimics
the tree-frog's cry, and migrates after October, like other
voluptuaries, who must have the round year warm, and fruit and eggs
always in market. Dressed in his speckled black swallow-tail coat, with
his long pen in his mouth and his shirt-bosom faultlessly white, the
woodpecker works like some Balzac in his garret, making the tree-top
lively as he spars with his fellow-Bohemians; and being sure himself of
a tree, and clinging to it with both tail and talons, he esteems
everything else that lives upon it to be an insect at which he may run
his bill or spit his tongue--that tongue which is rooted in the brain
itself.
In the hollow golden bowl of echoing evening the sailor noted, too, the
flicker, in golden pencilled wings and back of speckled umber and
mottled white breast, with coal-black collar and neck and head of
cinnamon. His golden tail droops far below his perch, and, running
downward along the tree-trunk, it flashes in the air like a sceptre over
the wood-lice he devours with his pickaxe bill. "Go to the ant, thou
sluggard!" was an instigation to murder in the flicker, who loves young
ants as much as wild-cherries or Indian corn, and is capable of taking
any such satire seriously upon things to eat. Not so elfin and devilish
as the small black woodpecker, he is full of bolder play.
The redbird, like the unclaimed blood of Abel, flew to the little trees
that grew low, as if to cover Abel's altar; the jack-snipe chirped in
the swampy spots, like a divinity student, on his clean, long legs,
probing with his bill and critical eye the Scriptures of the fields; the
quail piped like an old bachelor with family cares at last, as he led
his mate where the wild seeds were best; and through the air darted
voices 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 was
its command, and yet too narrowly dancing in the eyes, like spiders in a
well, disturbing the mirror there.
"Ha!" chuckled the man, as if his eyes had chuckled, so poorly did that
sound represent his lordly stature and look of high spirit--"ha! that's
what brings them all to my neighbor Johnson: a fair quotient!"
"Quotient?" repeated Jimmy.
"Johnson's a great factor hereabout," continued the military-looking
man, bending his handsome eyes on the bay captain, as if there was a
business secret between them, and peering at once mischievously and
nobly; "he makes the quotient to suit. He leaves the suttle large and
never stints the cloff."
"He don't narry a feller down to the cloth he's got, sir?" assented
Jimmy, 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: laws
which have no consignees, cattle which have no lawyer and no tongue,
rights which have lapsed by their assertion being suspended, till demand
and supply, like a pair of bulldogs, tear what is left to pieces. Armed
with his _ca. sa._, my neighbor Johnson offsets everybody's _fi. fa._,
serves his writ the first, and makes to gentlemen like you a
satisfactory quotient. But he cuts no capers with Isaac and Jacob
Cannon!"
"I expect now that you are Jacob Cannon?" remarked the tawny sailor, not
having understood a word of what preceded. "If that's the case, I'm glad
to know your name, and thank you for givin' me this lift."
By a bare nod, just intelligible, Mr. Cannon signified that the guess
would do; and still meditating aloud in his small, grand way,
continued:
"We let neighbor Johnson and his somewhat peculiar mother-in-law make
such commerce as suits him, provided he studies to give us no
inconvenience. That is his equation; with his quotient we have no
concern other than our slight interest in his wastage, as when Madame
Cannon rides down to change a bill and leaves an order for
supplies--rum, chiefly, I believe. Gentlemen like you come into this
country to deal, replevin, or what not, and we say to you all, 'Don't
tread on us--that is all.' We shall not look into your parcels, nor lie
awake of nights to hear alarms; but harm Isaac and Jacob Cannon one
ha'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 that
he was not beyond fifty years of age, of a spare, lofty figure--at least
six feet four high--sitting straight and graceful as an Indian, his
clothes well-tailored, his countenance and features both stern and
refined; every feature perfected, and all keen without being hard or
angular--and yet Jimmy did not like him. There seemed to have been made
a commodore or a general--some one designed for deeds of chivalry and
great philanthropy; and yet around and between the dancing eyes spider
lines were drawn, as if the fine high brain of Jacob Cannon had put
aside matters that matched it and meddled with nothing that ascended
higher above the world than the long white bridge of his nose. His
sentiments apparently fell no further towards his heart than that; his
brain 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 people
in this apparently new region of country.
"The quotient of much misplanting and lawyering is the lands on the
Nanticoke," spoke the gray-nosed Apollo; "the piece of country directly
before us, in the rear of my neighbor Johnson's cross-roads, was an old
Indian reservation for seventy years, and so were three thousand acres
to our right, on Broad Creek. The Indian is a bad factor to civilize his
white neighbors; he does not know the luxury of the law, that grand
contrivance to make the equation between the business man and the herd.
Ha, ha!"
Mr. Cannon chuckled as if he, at least, appreciated the law, and turned
the 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 the
brink of the Revolutionary War, they left a demoralized white race; and
others who moved in upon the deserted lands of the Nanticokes were, if
possible, more Indian than the Indians. This peninsula never produced a
great Indian, but when Ebenezer Johnson settled on Broad Creek it
possessed a greater savage than Tecumseh. He took what he wanted and
appealed to nature, like the Indian. He stole nothing; he merely took
it. He served, with anything convenient, from his fists to a
blunderbuss, his _fi. fa._ and his _ca. sa._ upon wondering but
submissive mankind. Need I say that this was before the perfect day of
Isaac 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 at
the prospect of oats, and continued:
"Such was the multiplicand to make the future race. Here, too, raged the
boundary-line debate between Penns and Calverts, with occasional raids
and broken heads, and a noble suit in chancery of fifty years, till no
man's title was known, and, instead of improving their lands, our
voluptuous predecessors improved chiefly their opportunities. You cut
sundry cords of wood and hauled it to the landing, and Ebenezer Johnson
coolly scowed it over to his paradise at the mouth of Broad Creek. You
had a little parcel of negroes, but the British war-ships, in two
successive wars, lay in the river mouth and beckoned them off. Having no
interest in any certain property, the foresters of the Nanticoke would
rather trade with the enemy than fight for foolish ideas; and so this
region was more than half Tory, and is still half passive, the other
half predatory. To neither half of such a quotient belongs the house of
Isaac and Jacob Cannon!"
His nostrils swelled a trifle with military spirit, and he raised the
bridge of his nose delicately, turning to observe his instinctive
companion.
"If it's any harm I won't ask it," the easy-going mariner spoke, "but
air you two Cannons ary kin to ole Patty Cannon?"
Mr. Cannon smiled.
"In Adam all sinned--there we may have been connected," he said. "The
question you ask may one day be actionable, sir. The Cannons are a
numerous people in our region, of fair substance, such as we have, but
they showed nothing to vary the equation of subsistence here till there
arose the mother of Isaac and Jacob Cannon. She was a remarkable woman;
unassisted, she procured the charter for Cannon's Ferry, and made the
port settlement of that name by the importance her ferry acquired; and
when she died there were found in her house nine hundred dollars in
silver--for she never would take any paper money--the earnings of that
sequestered ferry, to start her sons on their career. She knew the
peculiar character of some of her neighbors--how lightly _meum_ and
_tuum_ sat upon their fears or consciences--but she kept no guard except
her own good gray eyes and dauntless heart over that accumulating pile
of little sixpences, for there was but one spirit as bold as she in all
this region of the world--"
"And that, I reckon," observed Jimmy Phoebus, "was ole Patty Cannon
herself."
Mr. Jacob Cannon slightly bowed his head, and spoke aloud from an inner
communion:
"Forgive me, mother, that I make the comparison! Thy frugal oil, that
burned with pure and lonely widow's flame at Cannon's Ferry window, the
traveller hailed with comfort in his heart, and blessed the enterprise.
But to compound the equation another unknown quantity of female force
arose beside my mother's lamp. A certain young Cannon, distantly of our
stock, must needs go see the world, and he returned with a fair demon of
a bride, and settled, too, at Cannon's Ferry. He lived to see the
wondrous serpent he had warmed in his arms, and died, they say, of the
sting. But she lived on, and, shrinking back into the woods to a little
farm my mother's sons rented to her, she lighted there a
Jack-o'-the-lantern many a traveller has pursued who never returned to
tell. With Ebenezer Johnson's progeny and her own siren sisters, who
followed Madame Cannon to the Nanticoke, the nucleus of a settlement
began, 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'm
a pore man from Prencess Anne. If you took me for a nigger-dealer you
did me as pore a compliment as when I asked if you was Patty Cannon's
kin. 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 twinkling
care, but showed no personal concern.
"Every man must be his own security, my dark-skinned friend, till he can
find a bailsman. That place I never take--neither the debtor's nor the
security. The firm of Isaac and Jacob Cannon allows no trespass, and
further 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 let
such a pack of wolves use your neighborhood to trespass on human natur."