"
"No," Phoebus put in, "I'll be a lookin' after him on the banks of the
Nanticoke, Samson, while you keep right in the high-road from Laurel to
Georgetown, and on to Dover. Joe Johnson's been whipped at the post, and
banished from Delaware for life, and dussn't go thar no more."
"If you go, Samson," little Roxy put in, having reappeared, "Virgie'll
feel complimented. Anything that obliges Miss Vesty counts with Virgie."
"If you are a free man," Virgie herself exclaimed, her slight, nervous,
willowy figure expanding, "are you afraid to go into a freer state than
Maryland? If I was free I would want to go to the freest state of all.
Behave like a free man, Samson Hat, or what is freedom worth to you?"
"It's wuth so much, pretty gal, dat I don't want to be a-losin' of it,
mind, I tell you, 'sept to my wife when she'll hab me."
Samson watched the quadroon's delicate, high-bred features, her skin
almost paler than her young mistress's, her figure like the clove's
after a hard winter--the more active that a little meagre--her head
small, and its tresses soft as the crow blackbird's plumage, and the
loyalty that lay in her large eyes, like strong passion, for her
mistress, was turned to pride, and nearly scorn, when they listened to
him.
"A slave, Miss Vesty says"--Virgie spoke with almost fierceness--"is not
one that's owned, half as much as one that sells himself--to hard drink,
or to selfishness, or to fear.
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