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The third-person omniscient narrator begins the story in a wry tone, asking rhetorically whether there is anything a man won’t do to win a woman’s approval. He then presents “a few preliminary facts” to set up the story of what Dick Owens does to impress the woman he loves. The narrator explains that in the early 1850s, when the story is set, enslaved people were escaping from slave-holding states to northern states. The Fugitive Slave Law made it a crime to aid these fugitives. A young Ohio man who attempted to help an enslaved man escape was caught, convicted, and sentenced to jail, where he died of illness while aiding other sick prisoners. His case has become well known among abolitionists. Among those who witnessed the trial of the Ohio man was Dick Owen, the 22-year-old heir to a Kentucky estate that relies on slave labor.
Dick is a smart, pleasant, and entitled young gentleman who, because he has no need to exert himself, doesn’t bother to do so. To please Charity Lomax, the young woman he wants to marry, Dick studies law in an idle way. The judge who tutors him admits that Dick has potential, but he has neither “the whip of necessity” nor “the spur of ambition” to motivate him.
Something else spurs Dick into action—a deal of sorts that he and Charity make but don’t speak about until sometime after the war. While talking with Charity about the Ohio man’s trial, Dick admits that he understands the man broke the law. However, he also understands the man’s choice to try to help the enslaved man, whose owner, Sam Briggs, was known to abuse the slaves who worked for him. But the “principle of the thing” prevailed in the trial.
Charity agrees that Sam Briggs is “cruel” and wishes that all the slaves forced to work for him could escape. She calls the Ohio man a “hero” who risked his safety for others. This gives Dick an idea: if he does something self-sacrificing, Charity will love him. She thinks he’s “too lazy for any use” but admits that once he “has done something,” she might love him. He suggests that he could help get an enslaved man to Canada and freedom, and although Charity declares the idea “merely absurd,” not to mention illegal, Dick takes their conversation as a bargain.
