“No you wont, you’ll start now; and
don’t you lose any time about it, neither, nor
do any gabbling by the way. Just keep a tight
tongue in your head and move right along, and then
you won’t get into trouble with us, d’ye
hear?”
That was the order I wanted, and that was the one
I played for. I wanted to be left free to work
my plans.
“So clear out,” he says; “and you
can tell Mr. Foster whatever you want to. Maybe
you can get him to believe that Jim is your nigger—some
idiots don’t require documents—leastways
I’ve heard there’s such down South here.
And when you tell him the handbill and the reward’s
bogus, maybe he’ll believe you when you explain
to him what the idea was for getting ’em out.
Go ’long now, and tell him anything you want
to; but mind you don’t work your jaw any between
here and there.”
So I left, and struck for the back country.
I didn’t look around, but I kinder felt like
he was watching me. But I knowed I could tire
him out at that. I went straight out in the
country as much as a mile before I stopped; then I
doubled back through the woods towards Phelps’.
I reckoned I better start in on my plan straight
off without fooling around, because I wanted to stop
Jim’s mouth till these fellows could get away.
I didn’t want no trouble with their kind.
I’d seen all I wanted to of them, and wanted
to get entirely shut of them.
When I got there it was all still and Sunday-like,
and hot and sunshiny; the hands was gone to the fields;
and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs
and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome
and like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a
breeze fans along and quivers the leaves it makes
you feel mournful, because you feel like it’s
spirits whispering—spirits that’s
been dead ever so many years—and you always
think they’re talking about you. As
a general thing it makes a body wish he was dead,
too, and done with it all.
Phelps’ was one of these little one-horse cotton
plantations, and they all look alike. A rail
fence round a two-acre yard; a stile made out of logs
sawed off and up-ended in steps, like barrels of a
different length, to climb over the fence with, and
for the women to stand on when they are going to jump
on to a horse; some sickly grass-patches in the big
yard, but mostly it was bare and smooth, like an old
hat with the nap rubbed off; big double log-house
for the white folks—hewed logs, with the
chinks stopped up with mud or mortar, and these mud-stripes
been whitewashed some time or another; round-log kitchen,
with a big broad, open but roofed passage joining
it to the house; log smoke-house back of the kitchen;
three little log nigger-cabins in a row t’other
side the smoke-house; one little hut all by itself
away down against the back fence, and some outbuildings
down a piece the other side; ash-hopper and big kettle
to bile soap in by the little hut; bench by the kitchen
door, with bucket of water and a gourd; hound asleep
there in the sun; more hounds asleep round about;
about three shade trees away off in a corner; some
currant bushes and gooseberry bushes in one place by
the fence; outside of the fence a garden and a watermelon
patch; then the cotton fields begins, and after the
fields the woods.
