He had then tried to evade some one expected on the river, and, in a fit of rage at the awakening and wailing of the child, had hushed it forever, and then had shot Phœbus down.
Poor Hominy had sincerely believed that Johnson's peculiar slang was the language of the good Quakers, followers of Elias Hicks, who sheltered runaway slaves and spoke a "thee" and "thou" and "verily," and that strange misapprehension in her ignorant mind the keen dealer had made use of to decoy her into Levin's vessel and waft her into a distant country.
"We didn't steal her, Levin," Johnson said; "she wanted to mizzle from a good master, an' we jess sells the crooked moke an' makes it squar."
When Aunt Hominy, having under her protecting care the little children, came on board the Ellenora Dennis at Manokin Landing, Levin had been asleep, and knew nothing of the theft till it was too late to protest, and Johnson himself had sailed the cat-boat into broad water. Then, bearing through Kedge's Strait, he had cruised up the open bay, out of sight of the Somerset shore, and entered the Nanticoke towards night by way of Harper's Strait, and run up on the night flood; but the instinct of Jimmy Phœbus had cut him off at the forks of the Nanticoke, and propelled another crime to Johnson's old suspected record. He had never been indicted yet for murder, though murder was thought to be none too formidable a crime for him.
There was a zest of adventure in this guilty errand, which, but for its crime, would have pleased Levin moderately well, the roving drop in his blood expanding to this wild association; and he knew but little comparatively of the Delaware kidnappers, reading nothing, and in those days little was printed about Patty Cannon's band except in the distant journals like Niles's Register or Lundy's Genius of Emancipation. Levin had never sailed up the Nanticoke region before, and its scenery was agreeable to his sight, while his heart was just fluttering in the first flight of sentiment towards the interesting creature he had so unexpectedly and, as he thought, so strangely discovered there.
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. As he had looked up wonderingly, she had said to him:
"I have never seen a man before with his hair parted in the middle, but I think I have dreamed of one."
"Who air you?" Levin asked.
"Me! Oh, I'm Hulda. I'm Patty Cannon's granddaughter."
"That wicked woman!" Levin exclaimed. "Oh, I can't believe that!"