tilion
horn was blowing from the old tavern that reared its form so broadly and
yet so steeply in plain sight.

Levin had been brought up from Twiford's wharf the night before by the
pretty maid whom Jimmy Phoebus had so much frightened, and this was
his first day of restful feeling, having slept off the liquor fumes of
Sunday, the exciting watches of Monday, and the mingled pleasure and
pain, illness and interest, love and remorse, of Tuesday.

He had felt already the earliest twinges of youthful fondness for the
young girl he had spent the day with at Twiford's, while lying sick
there from a disordered stomach and nervous system, and her amiability
and charms, more than the temptation of unhallowed money, had changed
his purpose to escape at Twiford's and give information of the injury
inflicted upon Judge Custis's property.

It hardly seemed real that he had been an accessory to a felony and a
witness to a murder--the stealing of a gentleman's domestic slaves and
the braining of the smallest and most helpless of them, nearly in his
sight; yet so it had happened, and he felt the danger he was in, but
hesitated how to act. He had accepted the money of the trader, and
passed his mother's noblest friend on the river without recognition,
while a dastardly ball had probably ended poor Phoebus's career. To
all these deeds he was the only white witness, the only one on whose
testimony redress could be meted out.

He felt, therefore, that he was a prisoner, and his life dependent on
his cordial relations with the bloody negro-dealer and his band; and
Johnson had reiterated his promise that if Levin joined them in equal
fraternity he should make money fast and become a plantation proprietor.

This night coming, a raid on free negroes in Delaware was to be made by
the band in force, and Levin had been told that he must be one of the
kidnappers, and his frank co-operation that night would forever relieve
him of any suspicions of defection and bad faith.

"Steal one nigger, Levin," Joe Johnson had said, "and then if ever
caught in the hock you never can snickle!"

Levin interpreted this thieves' language to mean that he must do a crime
to get the kidnappers' confidence.

The power of this band he had divined a little of when, at points along
the river, especially about Vienna, there had been mysterious
intercourse between Joe Johnson and people on the shore, carried on in
imitations of animal sounds; and the negro ferrym