After the purchase was made, the sportsmen got me off to one side, and according to promise they gave me a part of the money, and directions how to get from there to Canada.  They also advised me how to act until I got a good chance to run away.  I was to embrace the earliest opportunity of getting away, before they should become acquainted with me.  I was never to let it be known where I was from, nor where I was born.  I was to act quite stupid and ignorant.  And when I started I was to go up the boundary line, between the Indian Territory and the States of Arkansas and Missouri, and this would fetch me out on the Missouri river, near Jefferson city, the capital of Missouri.  I was to travel at first by night, and to lay by in daylight, until I got out of danger.

The same afternoon that the Indian bought me, he started with me to his residence, which was fifty or sixty miles distant.  And so great was his confidence in me, that he intrusted me to carry his money.  The amount must have been at least five hundred dollars, which was all in gold and silver; and when we stopped over night the money and horses were all left in my charge.

It would have been a very easy matter for me to have taken one of the best horses, with the money, and run off.  And the temptation was truly great to a man like myself, who was watching for the earliest opportunity to escape; and I felt confident that I should never have a better opportunity to escape full handed than then.

CHAPTER XIV.

Character of my Indian Master.—­Slavery among the Indians less cruel.—­Indian carousal.—­Enfeebled health of my Indian Master.—­His death.—­My escape.—­Adventure in a wigwam.—­Successful progress toward liberty.

The next morning I went home with my new master; and by the way it is only doing justice to the dead to say, that he was the most reasonable, and humane slaveholder that I have ever belonged to.  He was the last man that pretended to claim property in my person; and although I have freely given the names and residences of all others who have held me as a slave, for prudential reasons I shall omit giving the name of this individual.

He was the owner of a large plantation and quite a number of slaves.  He raised corn and wheat for his own consumption only.  There was no cotton, tobacco, or anything of the kind produced among them for market.  And I found this difference between negro slavery among the Indians, and the same thing among the white slaveholders of the South.  The Indians allow their slaves enough to eat and wear.  They have no overseers to whip nor drive them.  If a slave offends his master, he sometimes, in a heat of passion, undertakes to chastise him; but it is as often the case as otherwise, that the slave gets the better of the fight, and even flogs his master;[4] for which there is no law to punish him; but when the fight is over that is the last of it.  So far as religious instruction is concerned, they have it on terms of equality, the bond and the free; they have no respect of persons, they have neither slave laws nor negro pews.  Neither do they separate husbands and wives, nor parents and children.  All things considered, if I must be a slave, I had by far, rather be a slave to an Indian, than to a white man, from the experience I have had with both.