A convulsive gulp on the part of Sol, but no reply.
"Have you never been married?"
"Yes, Mossa."
"Is your wife dead?"
"I hope so,—to de good God, I hope so, Mossa!"
Sol leaned forward on his oars and stopped rowing. He panted, he gnashed his teeth, he frothed at the mouth, and when I thought he must be an epileptic, he lifted himself up with one strong shudder, and turning on me a face stern as Cato's,—
"Nebber, nebber, nebber, shall I see wife or chil' agin!"
I then said openly that I was an Abolitionist,—that I believed in every man's right to freedom,—and that, as to the safest friend in the world, he might tell me his story,—which he thereupon did, and which was afterward abundantly corroborated by pro-slavery testimony on shore.
"Mossa Cutter" had fallen heir in South Carolina to a good plantation and thirty likely "niggers." At the age of twenty-five he sold out the former and emigrated to Florida with the latter. The price of the plantation rapidly disappeared at horse-races, poker-parties, cock-fights, and rum-shops. If Mossa Cutter speculated, he was always unsuccessful, because he was always hotheaded and always drunk.
In process of time "debts of honor" and the sheriff's hammer had dissipated his entire clientage of blacks, with the exception of Sol, a pretty yellow woman with a nice baby, who were respectively Sol's wife and child, and a handsome quadroon boy of seventeen, who was Mossa Cutter's body-servant.