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A week after the wedding they were seated, one afternoon, on the piazza of the colonel's house, where Dick had taken his bride, when a negro from the yard ran down the lane and threw open the big gate for the colonel's buggy to enter. The colonel was not alone. Beside him, ragged and travel-stained, bowed with weariness, and upon his face a haggard look that told of hardship and privation, sat the lost Grandison. . . .
The colonel alighted at the steps.
“Take the lines, Tom,” he said to the man who had opened the gate, “and drive round to the barn. Help Grandison down,—poor devil, he’s so stiff he can hardly move!—and get a tub of water and wash him and rub him down, and feed him, and give him a big drink of whiskey.”
These lines occur in the fourth section of the story, when the colonel thinks he has just happened to come across Grandison on the road to the plantation. Grandison has indeed faced risk and hardship to travel the roughly 500 miles from the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, where Dick abandoned him, to Kentucky. At any time, he could have been accosted by “slave hunters,” men paid to locate slaves who had escaped to the north. Returned escapees often faced punishment.
But Grandison risks capture and the rigors of the road to return to his family and to Betty, whom, the story implies, he marries after his return. Although he may play up his weariness and hunger to make his story of kidnapping more compelling, his journey was in fact fraught with difficulty. The colonel assumes that Grandison’s return is motivated by his “pining for the old plantation.” But it’s love for his family, not for the colonel and the life of a slave, that impels Grandison.
One Monday morning Grandison was missing. And not only Grandison, but his wife, Betty the maid; his mother, aunt Eunice; his father, uncle Ike; his brothers, Tom and John, and his little sister Elsie, were likewise absent from the plantation. . . . Extremely energetic measures were taken by the colonel and his friends. The fugitives were traced, and followed from point to point, on their northward run through Ohio. Several times the hunters were close upon their heels, but the magnitude of the escaping party begot unusual vigilance on the part of those who sympathized with the fugitives, and strangely enough, the underground railroad seemed to have had its tracks cleared and signals set for this particular train.
These lines, which occur near the story’s end, show the fruit of Grandison’s patient planning and of the risks he takes to secure the freedom of those he loves. The list of names and relations may be something of an inventory for the colonel, but for the narrator, it is a roll call of Grandison’s beloved.
The size of the party inspires “unusual vigilance” in people helping the family escape, too. These abolitionists and volunteers on the underground railroad also take risks and make sacrifices, though because of a different kind of love: a charitable feeling for humanity. The narrator’s slightly wry modifier, “strangely enough,” suggests the extent of planning that Grandison and others have had to do to perform the hazardous actions necessary to clear the tracks and set the signals—all of which have been done for love of family and freedom.
