Milburn saw that he must wear his old hat for life; he bent under the
servitude, and was alone the victim of it now.
CHAPTER XLVII.
FAILURE AND RESTITUTION.
The railroad struggle was renewed from year to year.
The Legislature was annually beset by strong lobby forces, and an
embittered contest between the Potomac Canal and the greater railway
company, to strangle each other, left the Eastern Shore railroad out of
notice. Locomotive engines of native invention began to appear; the
railroad to Washington was finally opened, and, next, to Harper's Ferry,
as Vesta's boy became a young horseman and learned to read. The
venerable court-house at Princess Anne, with its eighty-seven years of
memories, burned down during these proceedings, and a panic extended
over Patty Cannon's old region at the whisper of another Nat Turner
rebellion among the slaves; but no mention of the thousands of
abductions there was made in the anti-Masonic convention at Baltimore,
where Samuel S. Seward and Thaddeus Stevens nominated Mr. Wirt for
President, because one white man had been stolen. The murder of Jacob
Cannon by Owen Daw did produce some distant comment a little later,
chiefly because of the apathy of the Delaware society to pursue the
murderer.
By a long course of usury and legal persecution the Cannon brothers had
become detested in their own community, and when they sued O'Day, or
Daw, for cutting down a bee-tree on one of their farms he had tilled,
and then enforced the judgment of ten dollars, Daw,--now a man in
growth and of Celtic vindictiveness,--loaded his gun and started for
Cannon's Ferry, and waylaid Jacob just as he was leading his horse off
the ferry scow.
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