Читать книгу Chains and Freedom: or, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wheeler, a Colored Man Yet Living онлайн

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“The next day the goin’ was so bad we couldn’t git out of the woods, and we had to stay there all night; and oh! what times we did see; I lifted and strained till I was dead: and that night we slept in the wagons—the women took possession of one, and we of t’other; and the woods was alive with wolves and panthers; and such a howlin’ and screamin’ you never heard; but we builds up a large fire, and that kept ’em off. We lay on our faces in the wagon, with our rifles loaded, cocked and primed; and when them ’ere varmints howled, the horses trembled so the harnesses fairly shook on ’em: but there warn’t any more sleep there that night, than there would be in that fire.

“Next day we worried through, and stopped at a house, and got some breakfast of bears’ meat and hasty pudden’; and it come night, we made the ‘Blue Mountain;’ and on the top of it was some good folks; we stayed there one night, and Mr. Cooper, the landlord, come out to the barn, and axed me if I was hired out to that man, or belonged to him? ‘Well,’ said he, ‘if you did but know it, you are free now, for you are in a free state, and it’s agin’ the law to bring a slave from another state into this; and where be you goin’?’ ‘To Cayuga County,’ says I. ‘Well, when you git there, du you show him your backsides, and tell him to help himself.’