# The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive/Chapter 49

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The stage coach stopped for dinner at a dirty, uncomfortable tavern, the management of which seemed to be altogether in the hands of the slaves, of whom there was a great superabundance, the landlord being a sort of gentleman guest in his own house. The head servant of the establishment, a large, portly, soft-spoken mulatto, but very shabbily and dirtily dressed, seemed, for some reason or other, — perhaps from my politeness to him, — to take quite a fancy to me. After dinner he called me aside, and inquired if I was acquainted with the gentleman who had sat opposite to me at the table. ‘This was the supposed planter, my stage companion, in his younger days, as he had informed us, clerk and bookkeeper and afterwards partner of Gouge and McGrab. ​"No," I answered, "I did not know him except as my fellow-traveller from Charleston; I should like very well to know his name."
"As to his name," said my mulatto friend, "it would not be so easy to tell that. He goes by a good many names. Most every time he comes this way he has a new one. Have a care of him, master; he's a gambler. I thought I'd tell you, lest you might get cheated by him."
As this information seemed to come from pure good will on the part of my informant, I had no reason to distrust its correctness. I knew very well that gambling was not only practised in these southern slave states, as it is in the overgrown capitals of Europe, as a means of relieving the ennui of idleness, but that here, as there, a regular class of professional gamblers had sprung into existence, who lived by fleecing the unskilful and unwary. It was by no means unusual for members of that fraternity to have all the external marks of gentlemen; nor was there any improbability in the suggestion that my new acquaintance belonged to it.
Though he had inclined to differ, in the course of the morning, from our two northern companions on some questions of politics and morality, I could not but admire the grace and art with which he contrived, in the course of the afternoon, to worm himself into their confidence. When the stage coach stopped, for the night, at another tavern still more dirty, uncomfortable, and every way untidy, — if that could well be, — than the one at which we had dined, he proposed, after supper, a game of cards by way of whiling away the time. he other two were ready enough for it, and the three were soon busy at the game, in which they were joined by one or two planters of the vicinity, who happened to be lounging about the house. For myself, I positively declined to join them, declaring that I never touched a card, and never played at any game for money; and perceiving from my manner that I was quite inflexible on that point, ​the alleged gambler remarked, with some significance, that I had taken a very wise and safe resolution for a stranger travelling through the southern states.
After watching the game for some time, I retired to bed; and rising pretty early the next morning, since the journey was to be renewed. at five o'clock, I found them still at it: the two northern dupes haggard with want of sleep, and their very lengthened faces, distorted with ill-suppressed anxiety and suffering, seeming to have grown ten years older in that single night. They bore, in fact, but a distant resemblance to the two spruce, sleek gentlemen with whom I had ridden the day before. The other seemed as fresh and self-possessed as at the moment he had sat down; and as [entered the room, he took up and pock-. eted, with a graceful nonchalance that was quite admirable, the last stakes, and as it proved, too, the last money of his two companions.
Having sat down, as I afterwards learned, with only ten dollars in his pocket, as his whole means and stock in trade, he had made a good night of it. In the morning he had not less than two thousand, besides a fine mulatto boy of fifteen or sixteen, whom one of the planters had made over to him by way of squaring accounts.
Finding our two companions quite drained, he insisted upon paying their tavern bills himself, and upon lending each of them fifty dollars, as a fund to go upon till they could obtain further remittances; and this he did with as unconscious an air of sympathy and commiseration as if they had lost their money by some accident, instead of his having himself been the agent of their loss, by means not merely of his superior coolness and skill, but probably, also, by some other tricks of his profession. Not the master, who tosses a dollar to his slave by way of Christmas present, could do it with a greater air of generosity.:
It was curious to remark the crestfallen air of the Boston cotton broker and the New York editor, after the loss of their money. The day before, they had ​held up their heads; they had had their opinions, and pretty positive ones too; nor had they been at all slow or modest in asserting them. To-day they seemed quite sunk into nobodies, the stiffening all taken out of them, moody and silent, with nothing to say about any thing, eyeing the person to whom their money had been transferred, and to whom, the day before, they had paid such court as a rich planter, with a singular mixture of dislike and terror, much like that with which I had often seen an unfortunate slave eye a master whom he feared and hated, but from whom he felt it impossible to escape.
Indeed, I could not but think, that strip those two northern gentlemen of their fine clothes, and set them up in their present crestfallen and disconsolate condition on the auction block of Messrs Gouge and McGrab, or some other slave dealers, especially with the cool, keen eye of their late depredator upon them, and they might very easily have passed muster, as two "white niggers," born and bred in servitude, and stupid fellows at that, easily to be kept in order, and from whom very little mischief or trouble need be apprehended.
Finding these two disconsolate individuals sad, solemn, and as dry as a squeezed lemon, and quite insensible to all his efforts to amuse them, the gambler, whose victims they had become, directed his conversation to me. I cannot say but that I decidedly enjoyed their predicament. "O, my fine fellows," said I to myself, "you now have a little experience what a nice thing it is, this being stripped and plundered! You think it mighty hard to part with a few hundred dollars, the earnings, by means I don't know how particularly honest, of perhaps only a few weeks — money lost, too, not less by your own consenting folly, than by the skill and tricks of a man more knowing and adroit than yourselves. Now learn to sympathize a little. with multitudes of poor fellows in natural gifts and endowments not so very much, if at all, your inferiors — some of them, indeed, vastly ​your superiors, — regularly stripped and plundered, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, through a whole lifetime; and that, too, by pure fraud and force, without any consenting folly on their part; plundered, too, not only of the earnings of their hands, but, it may be, of the very wives of their affections, and children of their love, sent off to a slave auction, to suit the convenience, or to meet the necessities, of the men that call themselves their owners; and with just about as much right and title of ownership as this gambler has in you — the right of the weak over the strong, and of the crafty over the simple!"