She heard it with humility, making no answer but this:
"Once I had money an' friends a plenty; my money is gone, and so is my
friends; there's no fight now in pore ole Patty Cannon."
CHAPTER XLIV.
THE DEATH OF PATTY CANNON.
As Patty Cannon came out of the tavern the cross-roads were full of
people, taking their last look at the spot where she had triumphed for
nearly twenty years.
None thought to look at Van Dorn, nor ask what had become of him, and
his friend Sorden removed his body, unseen, to a spot in the pine woods,
where his unmarked grave was dug, and standing round it were three
mourners only, and Sorden said the final words with homely tears:
"I loved him as I never loved A male."
The Maryland constable marched Patty Cannon down to the little bridge of
planks where ran the ditch nearly on the State line, and tradition still
believes the figment that Joe Johnson at that moment was hiding beneath
it.
There, driven across the boundary like some borderer's cow, the queen of
the kidnappers was seized by the Delaware constable, and placed in a
small country gig-wagon, and, followed by a large mounted posse, the
road was taken to the little hamlet of Seaford, five miles distant.
She watched the small funereal cedars and monumental poplar-trees rise
strangled from the underbrush, the dark-brown streams flowing into inky
mill-ponds, the close, small pines, scarcely large enough to moan, but
trying to do so in a baby tone, and her eyes turned to the sand, where
she was soon to be.
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