he'd be a free man the minute he seen it, but if he missed it
he'd be in a slave country again and no more show for freedom. Every
little while he jumps up and says:

"Dah she is?"

But it warn't. It was Jack-o'-lanterns, or lightning-bugs; so he set
down again, and went to watching, same as before. Jim said it made him
all over trembly and feverish to be so close to freedom. Well, I can
tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him,
because I begun to get it through my head that he _was_ most free--and
who was to blame for it? Why, _me_. I couldn't get that out of my
conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn't
rest; I couldn't stay still in one place. It hadn't ever come home to
me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and
it stayed with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out
to myself that _I_ warn't to blame, because _I_ didn't run Jim off
from his rightful owner; but it warn't no use, conscience up and says,
every time, "But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you
could 'a' paddled ashore and told somebody." That was so--I couldn't
get around that no way. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to
me, "What had poor Miss Watson done to you that you could see her
nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one single word?
What did that poor old woman do to you that you could treat her so
mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you
your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how.
_That's_ what she done."

I got to feeling so mean and so miserable I most wished I was dead. I
fidgeted up and down the raft, abusing myself to myself, and Jim was
fidgeting up and down past me. We neither of us could keep still.
Every time he danced around and says, "Dah's Cairo!" it went through
me like a shot, and I thought if it _was_ Cairo I reckoned I would die
of miserableness.

Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was
saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free state he
would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he
got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to
where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two
children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an
Ab'litionist to go and steal them.

It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared t