"Virgie, marster."
"My heart told me so," exclaimed the Judge. "Your crime has been punished enough. I will send you to your wife."[15]
John Randel, Jr., observed, that evening:
"Devil Jim Clark has taken example from Patty Cannon, and squared the circle."
"Not dead?" asked Clayton.
"Yes, dead and buried. He was cleaning up his contract on the canal, and mistook the white Irish laborers there for kidnapped niggers. They set on him, and beat him and scared him together, so that he never recovered. They say he was 'converted' on his death-bed; or, as the saying is, 'he died triumphantly;' but the darkeys report that the devil came straight down with a chariot and drove him off."
"That fellow, Whitecar, I'm reserving," said Clayton, "to punish when I can use him to sustain an argument in favor of admitting negro testimony in kidnapping cases.[16] Without that admission, these kidnappers cannot be convicted: even Patty Cannon here may escape us, though she has killed white men."
Sorden spoke up, he being of the party:
"A disease called leprosy has broke out in ole Derrick Molleston's cabin; Sam Ogg has got it, too, and they say he fetched it up from the breakwater. Nobody will go near them. Black Dave is dead; he said he killed a man at Prencess Anne: the young wife of Levin Dennis, who turns out to be a lady, stayed and prayed with him to the last, and he went off humble and happy. But, my skin! another kidnapper has rented Johnson's tavern a'ready."