These friends proposed helping me by subscription; I accepted their kind offer, but in going among friends to solicit aid for me, they happened to get among traitors, and kidnappers, both white and colored men, who made their living by that kind of business.  Several persons called on me and made me small donations, and among them two white men came in professing to be my friends.  They told me not to be afraid of them, they were abolitionists.  They asked me a great many questions.  They wanted to know if I needed any help? and they wanted to know if it could be possible that a man so near white as myself could be a slave?  Could it be possible that men would make slaves of their own children?  They expressed great sympathy for me, and gave me fifty cents each; by this they gained my confidence.  They asked my master’s name; where he lived, &c.  After which they left the room, bidding me God speed.  These traitors, or land pirates, took passage on board of the first Steamboat down the river, in search of my owners.  When they found them, they got a reward of three hundred dollars offered for the re-capture of this “stray” which they had so long and faithfully been hunting, by day and by night, by land and by water, with dogs and with guns, but all without success.  This being the last and only chance for dragging me back into hopeless bondage, time and money was no object when they saw a prospect of my being re-taken.

Mr. Gatewood got two of his slaveholding neighbors to go with him to Cincinnati, for the purpose of swearing to anything which might be necessary to change me back into property.  They came on to Cincinnati, and with but little effort they soon rallied a mob of ruffians who were willing to become the watch-dogs of slaveholders, for a dram, in connection with a few slavehunting petty constables.

While I was waiting the arrival of my family, I got a job of digging a cellar for the good lady where I was stopping, and while I was digging under the house, all at once I heard a man enter the house; another stept up to the cellar door to where I was at work; he looked in and saw me with my coat off at work.  He then rapped over the cellar door on the house side, to notify the one who had entered the house to look for me that I was in the cellar.  This strange conduct soon excited suspicion so strong in me, that I could not stay in the cellar and started to come out, but the man who stood by the door, rapped again on the house side, for the other to come to his aid, and told me to stop.  I attempted to pass out by him, and he caught hold of me, and drew a pistol, swearing if I did not stop he would shoot me down.  By this time I knew that I was betrayed.

I asked him what crime I had committed that I should be murdered.

“I will let you know, very soon,” said he.

By this time there were others coming to his aid, and I could see no way by which I could possibly escape the jaws of that hell upon earth.