“God’s providence protected him today. Now we must do our part and get him away.” He covered his sightless eyes with his hand and sat thinking.
David Ruggles had been born free. He was schooled, alert, and he had courage. But once he had dared too much for his own good. In Ohio an irate slave-chaser’s whip had cut across his face. Its thongs had torn at his eyes, and he would never see again. But the slave whom he was helping to escape had got away. And David Ruggles had said, “My eyes for a man’s life? We were the winners!”
The seaman cleared his throat.
“There is a girl—a freewoman. She is to meet him here.”
The secretary frowned.
“Good heavens! Haven’t we enough to do without managing love trysts?”
Tom Stuart grinned in the darkness as he walked home. He knew the heart of this black man. He would show no sign of annoyance the next morning when he welcomed the young fugitive.
As for Frederick, he wanted to kiss the hands of this blind man when they clasped his own so firmly. An agent of the Underground Railroad! Underground Railroad!—a whisper up and down the Eastern Shore. Now Frederick was to hear them spoken aloud.
The increasing numbers of slaves who were escaping, in spite of the rigid cordons thrown round the slave states and the terrifying penalties for failure in the attempt, gave rise to wild rumors. The bayous of Louisiana, the backlands of Alabama and Mississippi, the swamps of Florida and the mountains of the Atlantic states, seemed to suck them in like a man-eating plant. People said there was a colony of blacks deep in the Florida scrub, where they lived a life of ease far inside the bayous that no white man could penetrate. Another group, so they said, raised crops on the broad flat plains that ran toward the border of Georgia; and two thousand more hid inside the dismal swamps of Virginia, coming out to trade with Negroes and whites.
There was no denying the fact that Negroes showed up across the border of Canada with surprising regularity—slaves from the rice fields of Georgia and South Carolina, the tobacco lands of Virginia and Maryland, and the cotton fields of Alabama.