was afraid had been stolen,
and the money received by the thief. 'I should not like to lose it,'
said he, 'for I worked hard for it, and sold many a poor d----l of a
black to Carolina and Georgia, to scrape it together.' He then went on
to tell many a perfidious tale. All along the road it seems he made it
his business to inquire where lived a man who might be tempted to
become a party in this accursed traffic, and when he had got some half
dozen of these poor creatures, _he tied their hands behind their
backs_, and drove them three or four hundred miles or more,
bare-headed and half naked through the burning southern sun. Fearful
that _even southern humanity_ would revolt at such an exhibition of
human misery and human barbarity, he gave out that they were runaway
slaves he was carrying home to their masters. On one occasion a poor
black woman exposed this fallacy, and told the story of her being
_kidnapped_, and when he got her into a wood out of hearing, he beat
her, to use his own expression, 'till her back was white.' It seems he
married all the men and women he bought, himself, because they would
sell better for being man and wife! But, said the youth, were you not
afraid, in traveling through the wild country and sleeping in lone
houses, these slaves would rise and kill you? 'To be sure I was,' said
the other, 'but I always fastened my door, put a chair on a table
before it, so that it might wake me in falling, and slept with a
loaded pistol in each hand. It was a bad life, and I left it off as
soon as I could live without it; for many is the time I have separated
wives from husbands, and husbands from wives, and parents from
children, but then I made them amends by marrying them again as soon
as I had a chance, that is to say, I made them call each other man and
wife, and sleep together, which is quite enough for negroes. I made
one bad purchase though,' continued he. 'I bought a young mulatto
girl, a lively creature, a great bargain. She had been the favorite of
her master, who had lately married. The difficulty was to get her to
go, for the poor creature loved her master. However, I swore most
bitterly I was only going to take to take her to her mother's at ----
and she went with me, though she seemed to doubt me very much. But
when she discovered, at last, that we were out of the state, I thought
she would go mad, and in fact, the next night she drowned herself in
the river close by. I lost a good five hundred