Soon Be Free by Lois Ruby

Author:Lois Ruby
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Aladdin

Chapter Thirty-Two

March 1857

THE OLD MAN IS A - WAITING

The surging Ohio River spread out before them, black and roaring and impossible to cross. Homer’s eyes were as wide as silver dollars. “You see ’em over there? See my mama and Solomon and Sabetha Girl?”

Callie stared off into the void. “They’re over there, all right.”

James squinted and pretended he could actually spot them clear across the river. “Might be them,” he assured Homer, but if they’d made it across, how in tarnation had they done it?

Or they could have been caught, tied up, hauled halfway back to Owensboro by now.

Or they could be dead. James’s stomach rolled up to his throat at that thought. “No. No!”

“No what?” Callie demanded, still gazing across the unforgiving river.

“No . . . time to worry about it. Let’s go,” James said. He whistled for Will, who hopped out from behind some bushes, hitching up his trousers.

A luxurious steamboat side-paddled its way through the center of the river, lights dancing on the water. James yearned to be on that boat just for one warm, dry, belly-filling night, but that wasn’t possible, not with two escaping Negroes.

They walked upriver until they found a narrow crossing place. James said, “Reckon we can ford the river here? We can wade out to those melting ice islands.” He remembered Miz Lizbet’s tales of runaways crossing the river by leaping from one ice pocket to the next as if they were cobblestones.

“I don’t know,” Will said. “If any one of those floes out in the middle won’t hold us, we’ll sure enough drown in the icy water.”

James reminded him that whatever ice wasn’t broken up and melted by the steamboat would certainly be solid enough to support them.

“That water look mighty col’,” Homer said, shaking his head. He tossed his rubber ball from hand to hand. “Freezin’ mighty col’.”

Callie was skeptical as well. “You expect me to jump from one piece of ice to another? Did you stop to think how my feet are going to freeze right onto that ice?”

But Homer had a solution. He pulled out of his shirt the gingham napkins that had once held his food, and he tied them around Callie’s feet with perky little knots poking over the top. “Now you got red-and-white shoes, yes, suh!”

Homer and James, wearing boots, had no trouble leaping across the first three chunks of ice, and Callie followed them, slipping dangerously, but she was agile.

However, it was impossible for Will’s crutch to gain purchase on the slick ice, and plumb hazardous for him to swing from one floe to another on his leg. And all this in the dark. “I can’t do it,” Will said grimly. “Y’all will have to go on without me.”

James reached across and grabbed Homer’s arm just as he was ready to jump to the next platter of ice. “We have to go back, all of us.”

By the time they were back on the shore, Will had a better idea.

“In the first light we’ll build us a raft.

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