“Now, I tell ye what, Tom,” said Haley,
as he came up to the wagon, and threw in the handcuffs,
“I mean to start fa’r with ye, as I gen’ally
do with my niggers; and I’ll tell ye now, to
begin with, you treat me fa’r, and I’ll
treat you fa’r; I an’t never hard on my
niggers. Calculates to do the best for ’em
I can. Now, ye see, you’d better jest settle
down comfortable, and not be tryin’ no tricks;
because nigger’s tricks of all sorts I’m
up to, and it’s no use. If niggers is quiet,
and don’t try to get off, they has good times
with me; and if they don’t, why, it’s thar
fault, and not mine.”
Tom assured Haley that he had no present intentions
of running off. In fact, the exhortation seemed
rather a superfluous one to a man with a great pair
of iron fetters on his feet. But Mr. Haley had
got in the habit of commencing his relations with
his stock with little exhortations of this nature,
calculated, as he deemed, to inspire cheerfulness
and confidence, and prevent the necessity of any unpleasant
scenes.
And here, for the present, we take our leave of Tom,
to pursue the fortunes of other characters in our
story.
CHAPTER XI
In Which Property Gets into an Improper State of Mind
It was late in a drizzly afternoon that a traveler
alighted at the door of a small country hotel, in
the village of N——, in Kentucky.
In the barroom he found assembled quite a miscellaneous
company, whom stress of weather had driven to harbor,
and the place presented the usual scenery of such
reunions. Great, tall, raw-boned Kentuckians,
attired in hunting-shirts, and trailing their loose
joints over a vast extent of territory, with the easy
lounge peculiar to the race,—rifles stacked
away in the corner, shot-pouches, game-bags, hunting-dogs,
and little negroes, all rolled together in the corners,—were
the characteristic features in the picture. At
each end of the fireplace sat a long-legged gentleman,
with his chair tipped back, his hat on his head, and
the heels of his muddy boots reposing sublimely on
the mantel-piece,—a position, we will inform
our readers, decidedly favorable to the turn of reflection
incident to western taverns, where travellers exhibit
a decided preference for this particular mode of elevating
their understandings.
Mine host, who stood behind the bar, like most of
his country men, was great of stature, good-natured
and loose-jointed, with an enormous shock of hair
on his head, and a great tall hat on the top of that.
In fact, everybody in the room bore on his head this
characteristic emblem of man’s sovereignty;
whether it were felt hat, palm-leaf, greasy beaver,
or fine new chapeau, there it reposed with true republican
independence. In truth, it appeared to be the
characteristic mark of every individual. Some
wore them tipped rakishly to one side—these
were your men of humor, jolly, free-and-easy dogs;
some had them jammed independently down over their
Copyrights
Uncle Tom's Cabin from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
