Tom, now unfettered, sits among the bales reading his Bible. In Chapter 14, a steamboat travels down the Mississippi, loaded with cotton bales. The next morning at breakfast, Simeon Halliday tells George that he and Eliza are being pursued and that they will be taken to their next station that night. She awakens to find herself in bed, drifts back into sleep, and when she wakes again George and little Harry are both with her. Rachel's husband, Simeon, arrives and tells them that George has arrived in the settlement and will be at their house that evening. In Chapter 13, the scene changes to a cheerful country kitchen in Indiana, where Eliza is sitting with an older white woman, Rachel Halliday, a Quaker. Tom tries to comfort the mother, but she is inconsolable, and that night Tom awakens to see her run past him and jump overboard to her death. That evening, Haley sells her baby to another passenger. Haley also brings aboard a young woman and her infant, whom he has bought through an agent. Above them, a group of white travelers discusses slavery. Haley takes his slaves aboard an Ohio riverboat, where they are kept in chains with the freight. Another purchase is John, a 30-year-old man who must leave his wife without saying goodbye. Wilson lends George some money and wishes him luck George is armed with pistols and says the slave-catchers will never take him alive.Ĭhapter 12 returns to Tom's plight: During their journey southward, Haley attends an estate sale where he buys three slaves, including a boy named Albert whose mother is devastated because Haley refuses to buy her, too. George has come back to Kentucky with Jim, another escaped slave who is going to try to free his old mother. He tells Wilson his story: George's older sister was beaten by their master, Harris, and sold to a trader to be taken to New Orleans. He examines the poster, rents a room, and then calls Wilson in for some words in private. The stranger, who turns out to be the factory owner for whom Eliza's husband once worked, agrees and says he knows this fugitive (it is George Harris).Īt that point, another stranger (George Harris disguised as a Latino man) enters, accompanied by an apparent slave whom he calls Jim. One of the Kentuckians says that if slaves are treated well they won't run away, so he has no sympathy for the man offering this reward. In a small-town Kentucky hotel, a stranger inspects a poster advertising a reward for a runaway slave named George, dead or alive.
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