Eliza made her desperate retreat across the river just in the dusk
of twilight. The gray mist of evening, rising slowly from the river,
enveloped her as she disappeared up the bank, and the swollen current
and floundering masses of ice presented a hopeless barrier between her
and her pursuer. Haley therefore slowly and discontentedly returned
to the little tavern, to ponder further what was to be done. The woman
opened to him the door of a little parlor, covered with a rag carpet,
where stood a table with a very shining black oil-cloth, sundry lank,
high-backed wood chairs, with some plaster images in resplendent colors
on the mantel-shelf, above a very dimly-smoking grate; a long hard-wood
settle extended its uneasy length by the chimney, and here Haley sat
him down to meditate on the instability of human hopes and happiness in
general.

"What did I want with the little cuss, now," he said to himself, "that
I should have got myself treed like a coon, as I am, this yer way?" and
Haley relieved himself by repeating over a not very select litany of
imprecations on himself, which, though there was the best possible
reason to consider them as true, we shall, as a matter of taste, omit.

He was startled by the loud and dissonant voice of a man who was
apparently dismounting at the door. He hurried to the window.

"By the land! if this yer an't the nearest, now, to what I've heard
folks call Providence," said Haley. "I do b'lieve that ar's Tom Loker."

Haley hastened out. Standing by the bar, in the corner of the room,
was a brawny, muscular man, full six feet in height, and broad in
proportion. He was dressed in a coat of buffalo-skin, made with the hair
outward, which gave him a shaggy and fierce appearance, perfectly in