The boy, whom the Judge was startled to recognize, at once began:
"Jedge Custis, the kidnapper man you left in the kitchen has stole Aunt Hominy and your little niggers. They was at Johnson's Cross-roads last night. 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 and fellow-Whig, Jonathan Hunn, resume!"
"Friend," spoke out a wiry, lean, healthy-skinned man, "this young man surprised me last night with intelligence that thy Maryland friends were marching on the very capital of Delaware, to steal men. I was out in the road at that late hour for another Christian purpose, and the Lord rewarded me with this good one: I brought friend Dennis to John Clayton's back door, and he lent us all his firearms. At the little brick grocery of William Parke, just beyond the Cowgill House—where I am told he sells ardent liquors to negroes contrary to law, and so takes the name among them of 'Kind Parke'—I found several of our free Delaware negroes, I fear on no good errand. So I remarked, 'If William Parke, 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 vile enticement 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 Cowgill House so as to make it at once a decoy and a hornet's nest. I despise war and men of war so much that I have somewhat studied their campaigns, and I suggested, friend Clayton, that the stairway was a good tactical defensive position—is that the vain term?—to send a volley out the main door, and a flank fire on every door and window on the sides of Cowgill's hall. It also commanded the back yard by a window on the staircase. A door beneath the staircase was barricaded. There was a festival, or feast, given that night, by absent friend Cowgill's permission, by these Dover folks of color. I would not wonder if it was designed or discovered by these scoundrels on thy line of states, friend Custis. I told the men-at-arms to leave their huzzies all below in the feasting-hall till the attack began, and then to let them escape up the stairway, and to defend that stair like sinful men. But first a negro spy knocked on the door, and a loop was thrown over his neck, and two of the 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! Captain Van Dorn had got to the bottom of the stairs, when the niggers half-way up fired over his head and shot mos' everything down. The Quaker man yer then pinioned the captain an' dropped him, wounded, out of the high window. I pity Van Dorn, but he says that he's in a bad business. I hope he ain't dead."
"Who is this Van Dorn?" asked Judge Custis. "I've heard of such a dare-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 suck the blossoms on the vines that has growed up through the eaves from outside, flew around in the dark among the yaller gals that was a-hidin' and a-prayin', and never feelin' the wasps sting em', thinkin' about them kidnappers. I reckon, gen'lemen, the kidnappers will never come to Dover no more."