"One word from you, white nigger, in all this journey to-day, scatters
your brains in the woods!"
Joe Johnson drew a pistol as he spoke, and Jimmy Phoebus saw his
nervous determination too clearly to provoke it.
"Now, put this dab upon the wagon," Johnson said, referring to the bed,
and it was carried down by the brothers, and the dead man's portmanteau
thrown in beside it.
"Joe! Joe!" came the voice of Patty Cannon, from the guest's room, "take
the poor old woman that's raised you along."
"Stow yer wid!" he answered; "we go to be gentlemen in a land where you
would spot us black. Cross cove and mollisher no more; raise another Joe
Johnson, if you can, to make this old hulk lush with business: I give it
to you."
He was gone in the vague dawn. She fell upon her face across the little
bar and moaned,
"A pore, pore, pore old woman!"
How long she had been leaning there she did not know, till familiar
sounds fell on her ears, and, looking up with a cry of recognition, she
shouted,
"Van Dorn! God bless you, Van Dorn! Is you alive again?"
The Captain was supported in the arms of another person, who took him,
ghastly pale, into the little bar and laid him upon her pallet,
muttering,
"I loved him as I never loved A male."
* * * * *
The morning was well advanced, and the sun made the gaunt and steep old
tavern rise like a mammoth from the level lands, and filled its upper
front rooms with golden wine of light, as Patty Cannon sat in one of
them by a window near the piazza, and talked to Van Dorn, whom she had
tenderly washed and re-dressed, and placed him in her own comfortable
rocking-chair of rushes, with his feet raised, as all unaffected
Americans like, and blanketed, upon a second chair.
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