Finally the stranger agreed to accept the mare and her saddle and bridle and some odds and ends, twine and bootblack, which were meant to restore some part of his faith in cosmic justice, and which he accepted as poor recompense for his trouble, reasonably enough.
Once rid of him, the people of the settlement could begin to consider the problem of that horse. Some of the men went through the tunnel from either end to check the state of its legs, since if one was broken they would have to shoot the creature. Then they could have dismembered it as needed and pulled it underground and filled in the hole in the road so as to conceal it. But the legs were sound.
Excavating around the horse would only open more tunnel, but they decided that they had no other choice than to make a big enough excavation to allow them to walk the horse up out of that hole. In the meantime, there it was, sobering up, nickering and switching its tail. So they decided to lift a shed off what it had for a foundation and set it down over the horse there in the middle of the road. It was a small shed, so it had to be set over the horse at a diagonal, the length of the horse being, in effect, the hypotenuse of two right triangles.
All this seems preposterous. But in fact one lapse of judgment can quickly create a situation in which only foolish choices are possible. Someone noticed that the horse’s tail was lying out on the road, so they had to put a child through the shed window to gather it in.
As it happened, there was a young Negro fellow in the settlement at that time, the first fugitive to make his way there.
This made the people feel serious and purposeful, and it also heightened their embarrassment about the matter of the horse. The young man, who stayed in the dry-goods store unless there was some ground for alarm, saw and heard everything. And it was pretty obvious how much he wanted to laugh. He was just lolling and languishing with the effort it cost him not to do it. He avoided their eyes, and he bit his lips almost raw. When the shed had been walked down to the road, and just as it was being set crosswise over the horse, there came from the store one harsh, painful, unwilled whoop of laughter. It was at that point they bethought themselves of the fact that the fellow might be feeling some justifiable alarm having to do with the question of their good sense. And indeed it was that very night he did escape, so to speak, and headed north on his own, no doubt rightly concluding that so much had happened to make the region suspect that he had best get some distance from it.
When they realized what had happened, a couple of the men rode after him on the two fairly serviceable horses that had not been traded for the horse in the hole (they wanted to be sure the stranger got far enough away not to trouble coming back, so it was their best horse they had given him). In any case, they hoped to overtake the fugitive in order to provide him with some food and clothes and direct him to the next abolitionist settlement, but for two days he eluded them. Then, when they had stopped for the night and were lying down to sleep, he stepped out of the dark and said, “I thank y’all kindly, but I think I best do this on my own.” They handed him the bundle they had brought for him and he stepped back into the dark and said, “Y’all get that horse out yet?” and laughed a little, and that was the last they heard of him.
They did dig a sloping trench they could walk the horse up, so that worked out well enough. But then they had to deal with the fact that a tunnel is a hard thing to be rid of. They had taken pains, when they were digging it, to scatter the dirt they removed as widely as possible, to conceal the excavation, and there was of course no way to reverse that process. And while they had made the tunnel secretly and at leisure, they were obliged to unmake it openly and in haste.
