Wesley, The slave you were thinking of is Sandy, the rent-a-slave Clemens
refers to in his Autobiography, p.102.  Clemens also recalls an incident in
which a slave is killed when its owner, incensed by some minor "infraction,"
strikes him in the head with a chunk of iron.  As I recall, the owner was
frowned on for this action, not because of his obvious inhumanity, but
because the act showed a cavalier attitude toward valuable property, as if
he had sabotaged a critical piece of farm equipment.  These incidents are
recalled, of course, almost twenty years following the writing of Life on
the Mississippi, when Twain's memory, as he himself indicated, might have
had a predisposition to produce events that never happened.

Martin Zehr
Kansas City, Missouri