Jack had not long been gone, before I heard a great noise; a man, crying out with a loud voice, “Catch him!  Catch him!” and hissing the dogs on, and they were close after Jack.  The next thing I saw, was Jack running for life, and an old white man after him, with a gun, and his dogs.  The fence being on sidling ground, and wet with the rain, when Jack run against it he knocked down several panels of it and fell, tumbling over and over to the foot of the hill; but soon recovered and ran to where he had left me; but I was gone.  The dogs were still after him.

There happened to be quite a thicket of small oak shrubs and bushes in the direction he ran.  I think he might have been heard running and straddling bushes a quarter of a mile!  The poor fellow hurt himself considerably in straddling over bushes in that way, in making his escape.

Finally the dogs relaxed their chase and poor Jack and myself again met in the thick forest.  He said when he rapped on the cook-house door, the colored woman came to the door.  He asked her if she would let him have a bite of bread if she had it, that he was a poor hungry absconding slave.  But she made no reply to what he said but immediately sounded the alarm by calling loudly after her master, saying, “here is a runaway negro!” Jack said that he was going to knock her down but her master was out within one moment, and he had to run for his life.

As soon as we got our eyes fixed on the North Star again, we started on our way.  We travelled on a few miles and came to another large plantation, where Jack was determined to get something to eat.  He left me at a certain place while he went up to the house to find something if possible.

He was gone some time before he returned, but when I saw him coming, he appeared to be very heavy loaded with a bag of something.  We walked off pretty fast until we got some distance in the woods.  Jack then stopped and opened his bag in which he had six small pigs.  I asked him how he got them without making any noise; and he said that he found a bed of hogs, in which there were the pigs with their mother.  While the pigs were sucking he crawled up to them without being discovered by the sow, and took them by their necks one after another, and choked them to death, and slipped them into his bag!

We intended to travel on all that night and lay by the next day in the forest and cook up our pigs.  We fell into a large road leading on the direction which we were travelling, and had not proceeded over three miles before I found a white hat lying in the road before me.  Jack being a little behind me I stopped until he camp up, and showed it to him.  He picked it up.  We looked a few steps farther and saw a man lying by the way, either asleep or intoxicated, as we supposed.

I told Jack not to take the hat, but he would not obey me.  He had only a piece of a hat himself, which he left in exchange for the other.  We travelled on about five miles farther, and in passing a house discovered a large turkey sitting on the fence, which temptation was greater than Jack could resist.  Notwithstanding he had six very nice fat little pigs on his back, he stepped up and took the turkey off the fence.