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Dick hurries home without Grandison, having sent an explanatory letter ahead. He dreads facing his father’s anger, but he wants to get back to Charity. At home, he explains truthfully what happened in Canada, though he doesn’t tell the whole story. The colonel feels betrayed but gradually shifts his anger to the abolitionists who lured Grandison away. Charity is shocked by what Dick has done and claims that she never suggested such a plan. Still, she agrees to marry him if only to protect him from his own recklessness.
They marry within weeks and are at the colonel’s house one afternoon when the colonel drives up in his buggy, with Grandison by his side, looking exhausted. The colonel says that as he drove along, he heard someone call his name and saw Grandison come out of the woods, barely able to walk but with a tale to tell. Abolitionists had decided that people hunting down runaways brought Grandison north to spy for them. They kidnapped Grandison, took him to a hut in Canada, and argued about whether to kill him. He escaped and returned “to his master, his friends, and his home.” Dick is skeptical, but the colonel is so moved that he celebrates Grandison’s return with good food and often calls on Grandison to regale the colonel’s friends with his story.
One morning about a month later, Grandison is nowhere to be found. Also absent are his wife and seven other family members. The colonel’s belief in the “fidelity” of slaves is shaken, and he and his friends worry that other slaves will follow. These men’s “ledgers” are “chiefly bound in black,” and to lose a slave is to take a financial hit.
Hunters chase Grandison’s party as they move north through Ohio, but it seems that the underground railroad has “had its tracks cleared and signals set for this particular train”—in other words, this escape has been carefully planned. The last the colonel sees of Grandison and his family is a glimpse of them from a port on Lake Erie. They are on a steamboat headed for Canada. As the colonel watches, Grandison points the colonel out to a crew member, who waves “derisively” as the colonel shakes his fist “impotently.”
