“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