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."
"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."
