I sat up in the dim morning, and looked about. It was a small, low room. Calhoun lay on a mattress against the door. It struck me with wonder and some shame, how careful he was, how watchful of little things. Yet for this matter, it seemed to me, if Mr. Todd had wished to make us prisoners there, he would have had no need to surprise us in the night. Presently there were noises outside, and, when Calhoun woke, we rose and opened the door, which led into a kind of kitchen where a young woman in a neat apron was cooking. Outdoors we found Turpentine and the black giant I had seen the night before unloading the waggon into a canal boat, somewhat small, perhaps forty feet long. For the broad canal ran close to the house, with a wet, slippery tow path beside it. Mr. Todd was down in the hold of the boat, which seemed well laden, and, as I judged, for the most part, with garden stuff, fish in barrels, and vegetables in bags. But the middle of it was free for living in. I made out, by peering in, a pile of corn husks and straw for sleeping, and a stove with the pipe wired along, to take the smoke to where it could float up freely through the scuttle. The scuttle door was lifted back on hinges, and a padlock hung from it. A ladder ran down inside. After breakfast, where the woman with the apron sat at the head of the table, and Calhoun talked with the lean man and Mr. Todd, we went back to the boat, and found one of the mules at the tow rope, and the other aboard, tied forward. Mr. Todd took the helm. Turpentine started the tow mule, shouting at him, “G'long now! You hyah me! I skin you toof.” The young woman waved her apron from the door. But this seemed surprising, that the big negro, Gamp, did not go ashore but sat with his feet hanging down the scuttle, and his bulk of shoulders slouched forward. He seemed ready to go to sleep in the sun. Calhoun looked at him a moment, then at Mr. Todd, and afterwards went fore, where he leaned against the rail whistling to himself. Big Gamp showed that Mr. Todd had surely been working his mind. Calhoun and I had no purpose to escape while in the Swamp, where we would be lost forever likely in its jungles and black gulfs. But Mr. Todd might think us desperate to that extent, and cause us to be tied up below by the monstrous black man, big enough to throttle an ox, and silent, and savage-eyed. For though I was stout for my age, and Calhoun a sinewy, enduring man, and both of us ready to fight, yet we could clearly do nothing with Gamp. Old Turpentine might count for little, but Mr. Todd seemed stronger, heavier than either of us. I went forward to Calhoun, and he was not cheerful, though it seemed to be not the prospect which troubled him so much, but that he suspected himself of a mistake. “That man, Todd, Bennie,” he said, “I figured him wrong. I didn't put him high enough. He's cornered me.” “Why doesn't he make sure of us now?”