int of even
half believing he was doing Roxy a splendid surreptitious service in
selling her "down the river." And then he kept diligently saying to
himself all the time: "It's for only a year. In a year I buy her free
again; she'll keep that in mind, and it'll reconcile her." Yes; the
little deception could do no harm, and everything would come out right
and pleasant in the end, anyway. By agreement, the conversation in
Roxy's presence was all about the man's "up-country" farm, and how
pleasant a place it was, and how happy the slaves were there; so poor
Roxy was entirely deceived; and easily, for she was not dreaming that her
own son could be guilty of treason to a mother who, in voluntarily going
into slavery--slavery of any kind, mild or severe, or of any duration,
brief or long--was making a sacrifice for him compared with which death
would have been a poor and commonplace one. She lavished tears and
loving caresses upon him privately, and then went away with her owner
--went away brokenhearted, and yet proud to do it.
Tom scored his accounts, and resolved to keep to the very letter of his
reform, and never to put that will in jeopardy again. He had three
hundred dollars left. According to his mother's plan, he was to put that
safely away, and add her half of his pension to it monthly. In one year
this fund would buy her free again.
For a whole week he was not able to sleep well, so much the villainy
which he had played upon his trusting mother preyed upon his rag of
conscience; but after that he began to get comfortable again, and was
presently able to sleep like any other miscreant.
The boat bore Roxy away from St. Louis at four in the afternoon, and she
stood on the lower guard abaft the paddle box and watched Tom through a
blur of tears until he melted into the throng of people and disappeared;
then she looked no more, but sat there on a coil of cable crying till far
into the night. When she went to her foul steerage bunk at last, between
the clashing engines, it was not to sleep, but only to wait for the
morning, and, waiting, grieve.
It had been imagined that she "would not know," and would think she was
traveling upstream. She! Why, she had been steamboating for years. At
dawn she got up and went listlessly and sat down on the cable coil again.
She passed many a snag whose "break" could have told her a thing to break
her heart, for it showed a current moving in the same direction that the
boat was going; but her thoughts were elsewhere, and