The wretched man listened and trembled.
"Mary's sperrit's callin' 'Zeke!'" Phoebus continued, awful in his
inflection.
The miserable procurer's heart stopped at the words, and his eyeballs
turned in torment.
"Come, Zeke! poor Mary's a-waitin' for ye!" cried the sailor, suddenly,
in a voice of thunder, and as suddenly relapsed into the low singing of
the quiet hymn again:
"Deep-en de woun' dy hands have made
In dis weak, helpless soul,
Till mercy, wid its mighty aid
De-scen to make me whole;
Yes, Lord!
De-scen to make me whole."
The elegant Iscariot, at the thunder of the invocation, had reached into
a place between two of the cypress shingles in the roof, where he had
hidden the sailor's knife, the blade being pressed out of sight, and
only the handle within his grasp. It had been overlooked in the exciting
scenes of the previous few minutes, and now recurred to his mind, as
superstitious passions rolled like dreadful meteors across the black and
hopeless chasm of his despairing soul.
When the low drone of the hymn he had heard his victim sing to her baby,
when her faith in him was pure and childlike, crossed his maddened ears
again, he raised one shriek of "Mercy!" to which no answer fell, and
drew the blade across his throat and fell dead in the kidnappers' den.
CHAPTER XXVI.
VAN DORN.
A thin fur of frost was on the level farm-lands, and the saffron and
orange leaves were falling almost audibly from the trees, as Levin
Dennis awoke on Wednesday, in the long, low house standing back in the
fields from Johnson's cross-roads, and drank in the cool, stimulating
morn, the sun already having made his first relay, and his postilion
horn was blowing from the old tavern that reared its form so broadly and
yet so steeply in plain sight.
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