Page:Sketchesinhistory00pett.pdf/132

126 and ventured to ask him how he could obtain his freedom. He advised him to secrete himself on a boat that was lying near where they had stopped and keep himself hidden among the freight until they got to Pittsburgh, then showing him the north star and teaching him the way to find it, he told him to go towards it until he came to water that he could not see across, then turn to the right and keep within sight of it until he could see land and houses on the other side; “that,” said he, “is Canada. Get over there and you will be a free man.”

Tom Hawkins had witnessed more than once cases of excruciating torture inflicted on defenseless, captured fugitives, and knew that just such punishment awaited him if he should fail in an attempt to gain his freedom; but such was his yearning for liberty, the prompting of his untutored manhood, that he did not shrink from the trial. He was so fortunate as to smuggle himself on board a boat that favored his escape as far as Pittsburgh, but when he found himself alone on the north shore of the river, a few miles below the city, without food, except a small supply for a day or two, no clothes except a light summer suit, ignorant of the geography of the country, and of any direct route to a place of safety that seemed to him to exist only in imagination; and worst of all, beholding an enemy, as he supposed, in every human being that he met, in the dreariness of a dark, rainy night in the woods, he thought over the horrid scenes he had been compelled to look upon, of captured fugitives that had been returned to slavery by virtue of the fugitive slave law, and whipped to death as a warning to any who thought of running away. Tom was not discouraged by all this. He sat down and called to mind the instruction his friend gave him about the way to the place where all are free, and determined to follow it out without the least variation; consequently he did not go