He’d sent Hughes packing, all right. But there had been hell to pay first. Hughes had been all set to go in town and bring out the authorities. The nigger had struck him, he blubbered, and should get the death penalty for it. The young mule certainly had given his dear cousin an awful wallop. Had Covey let himself go, he would have grinned. But, after all, it was unthinkable for a black to strike a white man. _The bastard!_ But had it got about that he, Covey, couldn’t handle a loony strippling--not a day over sixteen--he would be ruined. Nobody would ever give him another slave to break. So Hughes’s mouth had to be shut. He was willing to go, but he had forced a full month’s salary out of Covey. The worst thing was Hughes’s taking the gun along in the bargain! Hughes swore he couldn’t find the gun. But Covey knew he had cleaned that gun just the day before and stood it right behind the hall door. That’s where he always kept it, and he knew it was there. No use telling him one of the boys took it. A black won’t touch a gun with a ten-foot pole. No, it had gone off with Hughes, and he’d just have to get himself another one next time he went to Baltimore. By now Covey had convinced himself that most of his troubles stemmed from Hughes. Take the matter of Captain Auld’s boy. After Hughes left, he’d handled him without a mite of trouble. Frederick for his part had tasted freedom--and it was good. “When a slave cannot be flogged,” he wrote many years later, “he is more than half free.” So it was as a free man that he reasoned with himself. He would prove to Covey--and through him to Captain Auld--that he could do whatever job they assigned. When he did not understand, he asked questions. Frederick was not afraid. He was not afraid of anything. Furthermore, his fellow-workers looked up to him with something like awe. Until now he had been just another link in the shackles that bound them to the mountain of despair. Their hearts had been squeezed of pity, as their bodies had been squeezed of blood and their minds of hope. But they had survived to witness a miracle! They told it over and over, while they bent their backs and swung their arms. They whispered it at night. Old men chewed their toothless gums over it, and babies sucked it in with their mothers’ milk. The word was passed along, under cover, secret, unsuspected, until all up and down the Eastern Shore, in field and kitchen, they knew what had happened in “ole man Covey’s back yard on ’at mawnin’!” And memories buried beneath avalanches of wretchedness began to stir. Something heard somewhere, someone who “got through!” A trail--footprints headed “no’th”--toward a star! And as they talked, eyes that had glazed over with dullness cleared, shoulders straightened beneath the load, and weary, aching limbs no longer dragged.