he was
coming to love him, but she did not say so. She told him to go along to
St. Louis now, and she would get ready and follow. Then she smashed her
whisky bottle and said:
"Dah now! I's a-gwine to make you walk as straight as a string,
Chambers, en so I's bown, you ain't gwine to git no bad example out o'
yo' mammy. I tole you you couldn't go into no bad comp'ny. Well, you's
gwine into my comp'ny, en I's gwine to fill de bill. Now, den, trot
along, trot along!"
Tom went aboard one of the big transient boats that night with his heavy
satchel of miscellaneous plunder, and slept the sleep of the unjust,
which is serener and sounder than the other kind, as we know by the
hanging-eve history of a million rascals. But when he got up in the
morning, luck was against him again: a brother thief had robbed him while
he slept, and gone ashore at some intermediate landing.

CHAPTER 16 -- Sold Down the River
_If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he
will not bite you. This is the principal difference between
a dog and a man._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
_We all know about the habits of the ant, we know all about
the habits of the bee, but we know nothing at all about the
habits of the oyster. It seems almost certain that we have
been choosing the wrong time for studying the oyster._
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

When Roxana arrived, she found her son in such despair and misery that
her heart was touched and her motherhood rose up strong in her. He was
ruined past hope now; his destruction would be immediate and sure, and he
would be an outcast and friendless. That was reason enough for a mother
to love a child; so she loved him, and told him so. It made him wince,
secretly--for she was a "nigger." That he was one himself was far from
reconciling him to that despised race.
Roxana poured out endearments upon him, to which he responded
uncomfortably, but as well as he could. And she tried to comfort him, but
that was not possible. These intimacies quickly became horrible to him,
and within the hour he began to try to get up courage enough to tell her
so, and require that they be discontinued or very considerably modified.
But he was afraid of her; and besides, there came a lull now, for she had
begun to think. She was trying to invent a saving plan. Finally she
started up, and said she had found a way out. Tom was almost suffocated
by the joy of this sudden good news. Roxana said:
"Here is de plan,