Not particularly courageous, he was so destitute of sensibility that he
felt no fear anywhere; and, generally going among his low white
inferiors, he was in the habit of being looked up to, and rather
preferred their society. On everything he had an opinion, and permitted
no stranger in Baltimore to entertain any. The riot spirit, so early and
so frequent in that town, reposed upon such vulturous and self-conscious
social pests as he, ever claiming to be the public tone of Maryland.
"Patty," said Allan McLane, in his hare-lip and bland, yet hard, voice,
like mush eaten with a bowie-knife, "I may pay you this money and you
may fail to deliver the property. Will she be tractable?"
"Cunnil, I'll scare her most to death. She'll hide from me yer by your
fire, and my voice outside the door will keep her in yer till day."
McLane went to his portmanteau and unlocked it, and took out rolls of
notes and a buckskin bag of gold.
The yellow lustre seemed to flash in Patty Cannon's rich black eyes,
like the moon overhead upon a well.
"How beautiful it do shine, Cunnil!" she said. "Nothing is like it fur a
friend. Youth an' beauty has to go together to be strong, but, by God!
gold kin go it alone."
He counted out two piles, one of notes and one of gold, using his gold
spectacles upon his hawk nose to do so, and said:
"Patty, I've bought many a grandchild _with_ the old woman, but this is
the first child I have bought _from_ the grandmother.
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