Not agony nor repentance nor any hope of escape
fluttered her cold heart, but only a feeling of being ungratefully
deserted by her friends, and ill-treated by her equals and neighbors,
who had so seldom warned or avoided her; no preacher had come to tell
her the naked gospel, and some had bowed to her respectfully, and even
begged her oats, and made subscriptions from her ill-gotten silver.
Seaford was a sandy place upon a bluff of the Nanticoke, and, as the
procession came in, a party of surveyors, working for Meshach Milburn's
railroad, paused to jeer the old kidnapper. She had grown suddenly old,
and never raised her voice, that had always been so forward, to make a
reply.
The magistrate, Dr. John Gibbons, had been an educated young Irishman
who landed from a ship at Lewes, and, marrying a lady in Maryland, near
Patty Cannon's, became the legal spirit of the little town. His office,
a mere cabin, on a corner by his house, being too small for the purpose,
the examination was adjourned to the tavern, at the foot of the hill,
near where a mill-pond brook dug its way to the Nanticoke. Around the
tavern some box-bush walks were made in the sand, and willow-trees
bordered the cold river-side, and, at pauses in the hearing, wild-fowl
were heard to play and pipe in the falling tide.
The evidence of Cy James and other cowardly companions in her sins was
quickly given, and the procession started through the woods and sands to
Georgetown, twelve miles to the eastward, where Patty Cannon was
received by all the town, waiting up for her, and the jail immediately
closed her in.
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