In a small-town Kentucky hotel, a stranger inspects a poster advertising a reward for a runaway slave named George, dead or alive. One of the Kentuckians says that if slaves are treated well they won’t run away, so he has no sympathy for the man offering this reward. The stranger, who turns out to be the factory owner for whom Eliza’s husband once worked, agrees and says he knows this fugitive (it is George Harris).
At that point, another stranger (George Harris disguised as a Latino man) enters, accompanied by an apparent slave whom he calls Jim. He examines the poster, rents a room, and then calls Wilson in for some words in private. He tells Wilson his story: George’s older sister was beaten by their master, Harris, and sold to a trader to be taken to New Orleans. George has come back to Kentucky with Jim, another escaped slave who is going to try to free his old mother. Wilson lends George some money and wishes him luck; George is armed with pistols and says the slave-catchers will never take him alive.
Chapter XII returns to Tom’s plight: During their journey southward, Haley attends an estate sale where he buys three slaves, including a boy named Albert whose mother is devastated because Haley refuses to buy her, too. Another purchase is John, a 30-year-old man who must leave his wife without saying goodbye. Haley takes his slaves aboard an Ohio riverboat, where they are kept in chains with the freight. Above them, a group of white travelers discusses slavery. Haley also brings aboard a young woman and her infant, whom he has bought through an agent. That evening, Haley sells her baby to another passenger. Tom tries to comfort the mother, but she is inconsolable, and that night Tom awakens to see her run past him and jump overboard to her death. Haley regards this as bad luck.
In Chapter XIII, the scene changes to a cheerful country kitchen in Indiana, where Eliza is sitting with an older white woman, Rachel Halliday, a Quaker. Rachel’s husband, Simeon, arrives and tells them that George has arrived in the settlement and will be at their house that evening. Eliza faints. She awakens to find herself in bed, drifts back into sleep, and when she wakes again George and little Harry are both with her. The next morning at breakfast, Simeon Halliday tells George that he and Eliza are being pursued and that they will be taken to their next station that night.
In Chapter XIV, a steamboat travels down the Mississippi, loaded with cotton bales. Tom, now unfettered, sits among the bales reading his Bible. He misses his old home and his family but finds comfort in the Scriptures. Also on the boat is a white man named Augustine St. Clare, traveling with an older woman and a little girl of five or six, his daughter Evangeline, called Eva. The girl wanders all over the boat and talks with the slaves. Tom sees her as angelic. She asks Tom where he is going, and when he tells her he will be sold, she says she will ask her father to buy him. Soon afterward, Eva falls into the water, and Tom rescues her. Her father bargains with Haley to buy Tom and soon does so.
