“The next day the goin’ was so bad we couldn’t git out of the woods, and we had to stay there all night; and oh! what times we _did_ see; I lifted and strained till I _was_ dead: and that night we slept in the wagons—the women took possession of one, and we of t’other; and the woods was alive with wolves and panthers; and such a howlin’ and screamin’ you never heard; but we builds up a large fire, and that kept ’em off. We lay on our faces in the wagon, with our rifles loaded, cocked and primed; and when them ’ere varmints howled, the horses trembled so the harnesses fairly shook on ’em: but there warn’t any more sleep there that night, than there would be in that fire.
“Next day we worried through, and stopped at a house, and got some breakfast of bears’ meat and hasty pudden’; and it come night, we made the ‘Blue Mountain;’ and on the top of it was some good folks; we stayed there one night, and Mr. Cooper, the landlord, come out to the barn, and axed me if I was _hired_ out to that man, or _belonged_ to him? ‘Well,’ said he, ‘if you did but know it, you are free now, for you are in a free state, and it’s agin’ the law to bring a slave from another state into this; and where be you goin’?’ ‘To Cayuga County,’ says I. ‘Well, when you git there, du you show him your backsides, and tell him to help himself.’
The next night we stayed in Owego; but I’m afore my story, for goin’ down the Blue Mountain next day, the leaders run, and I couldn’t hold ’em if I should be shot, and they broke one arm off of the block tongue. Well, I stopped, and master comes runnin’ up, and he fell on, and struck me, and mauled me most awfully; and jist then a man come up on horseback, and says he to master, ‘If you want to _kill_ that boy, why don’t ye beat his brains out with an axe and done with it—but don’t maul him so; for _you_ know, and _I_ know, for I see it all myself, that that boy ain’t able to hold that team, and I shouldn’t a thought it strange if they had dashed every thing to pieces.’ Well, master was mad ’nough, for that was a dreadful rebuke; and says he, ‘You’d better make off with yourself, and mind your own business.’ The man says, ‘I don’t mean to quarrel with you, and I won’t; but I think ye act more like a _devil_ than a _man_! ☜ So off he went; and _I love that man yit_!