I

ANGELS

He was the most innocent-looking chap you ever saw. He had the face of a cherub, eyes which inhabit the faces of angels, and a smile which every woman envied.

During her lifetime his mother had called him an angel. His sister composed a title for him from the initials of his name, and for short called him Org. The neighbors called him—if everything the neighbors called him should be recorded, this story would have to be fumigated at the very start.

He had just come to Tickfall from California. His mother and father did not miss him when he left, for they were dead. The neighbors missed him, but they did not mourn his loss. When Orren Randolph Gaitskill had gone, some predicted that he would be the loudest tick in Tickfall. They did not mean to flatter the youth or pay him a compliment. Everybody breathed easier, the cats came down out of the trees, the little girls walked the streets without the fear that their pig-tails of hair would be used for leading ropes, and the old inhabitants thankfully prophesied that there would be no more earthquakes in California.

As for Miss Virginia Harwick Gaitskill, his sister—bless her! the earth never shook when she was around, but the hearts of men were strangely agitated.

Everybody called Miss Virginia an angel except her angelic brother. He called her “Gince.”

Just now that young lady stood upon the portico of Colonel Tom Gaitskill’s home, calling in a clear, deep-toned voice:

“Org! Oh, Org! Come here!”

That youth, who had been playing “Indian” upon the Gaitskill lawn, promptly dropped upon his stomach at the sound of her voice, kept himself concealed behind some thick shrubbery, and began, as he expressed it, to “do a sneak.” His intended destination was the capacious stable in the rear of the premises. But he did not get far.

“Hurry up, Org! Come on here! I see you!” his sister called.

Her last remark was an absolute falsehood. She did not see him. But angels have a language of their own. It is not possible to command their attendance by ordinary earthly methods, and Virginia’s way succeeded.

“Aw, what you want, Gince? A feller can’t have no time to himself when you are around.”

“I want stamps, Org,” the girl said sweetly. “Take this fifty-cent piece and bring me back twenty-five twos.”

“What’s the name of that there woman in that post-office?”

“Miss Paunee,” she told him.

“It sounds like a mustang name to me,” Org remarked, pocketing the money ungraciously, and starting away with his hat pulled down over his eyes.

A moment later he assumed his former character, that of a prowling Indian, and his progress toward the street was from bush to bush and from tree to tree. He crept noiselessly down the street, looking from side to side with alert watchfulness, giving each bit of shrubbery and clump of weeds a careful inspection in anticipation of lurking enemies. When he came to the brow of the hill he ran downward at full speed. It was easier to run than to walk; slower speed would require the effort of holding back, and a genuine Indian hates work. At the foot of the hill he stopped like a clock with a broken spring.

There stood before him a little negro boy, almost exactly his size, and apparently his own age. Org’s first impression was that the stranger was certainly dark-complected, there being no variation in the color scheme except the whites of his eyes. Org’s next thought was that the darky was queerly dressed.

He was wearing a woman’s silk shirt-waist; his coat had originally belonged to some woman’s coat-suit, adjusted to the present wearer by bobbing its tail. His trousers had once belonged to some man who was much larger in the waist and much longer in the leg; but the present owner of the nether garments had made certain clumsy adjustments and the trousers made a sort of fit. The stranger’s legs were covered with a woman’s purple-silk stockings, and on his flat feet were a pair of high-heeled pumps.

“Hello!” Org said, his eyes glued to the ladylike clothes.

“Mawnin’, Marse, howdy?” the little negro responded timidly.

“My name ain’t Marse, it’s Org,” the white boy replied. “What’s your name? Who are you?”

“Dey calls me Little Bit. I’s Cap’n Kerley’s white nigger, an’ I sorter janitors aroun’ de Hen-Scratch.”

“White nigger?” Org remarked wonderingly, after a comprehensive survey of the negro boy. “The white of your eyes is white. That’s all the white I can see. Where you going?”

“Out to de Cooley bayou on de Nigger-Heel plantation.”

“Me, too,” Org remarked as he fell in step beside the negro boy.

Which is the reason why Miss Gaitskill waited impatiently the rest of the day for her stamps.

Without knowing it, Orren Randolph Gaitskill had found the greatest playmate in the world. Let every man born south of the Ohio River say “Amen!”

Little Bit was an angel, too. His mother called him “her angel chile.” His mother had fifteen other angelic children in her cabin, Little Bit being the youngest and the last. So his mother named him Peter, after his father, and Postscript to indicate his location in the annals of the family; thus Peter Postscript Chew took his place in the world.

But white folks never pay any attention to a negro’s name. They called him Little Bit.

In front of the Hen-Scratch saloon in the negro settlement known as Dirty-Six, Little Bit climbed into an empty farm-wagon to which two mules were harnessed.

“Dis here is Mustard Prophet’s team. He’s de overseer on Marse Tom’s Nigger-Heel plantation. I prefers to set down an’ travel. It ails my foots to walk. Mustard’ll let us ride.”

“I rode in a automobile in California,” Org remarked as he climbed into the wagon beside Little Bit.

“You’s fixin’ to ride in a aughter-be-a-mule now,” Little Bit snickered.

Mustard came out of the saloon and viewed the two boys with a great pretense of surprise.

“You two young gen’lemans gwine out wid me, too?” he asked.

“Yes, suh,” Little Bit told him.

“Gosh! I’ll shore hab a busy day wid de babies,” Mustard growled in a good-natured tone. “Dat ole Popsy Spout is in de secont imbecility of his secont childhood, an’ dis here white chile an’ dis cullud chile—lawdy!”

He climbed upon the wagon seat and clucked to his mules, driving slowly down the crooked, sandy road toward the Shin Bone eating-house.

“You boys watch dis team till I gits back,” he ordered. “Popsy’s gwine out wid us.”

II

POPSY SPOUT

About the time the boys had climbed into Mustard’s wagon in front of the saloon, Popsy Spout had entered the door of the eating-house and stood there with all the hesitancy of imbecility.

He was over six feet tall and as straight as an Indian. His face was as black as tar, and was seamed with a thousand tiny wrinkles. His long hair was as white as milk, and his two wrinkled and withered hands rested like an eagle’s talons upon a patriarchal staff nearly as tall as himself.

On his head was a stove-pipe hat, bell-shaped, the nap long since worn off and the top of the hat stained a brick-red by exposure to the weather. An old, faded, threadbare and patched sack coat swathed his emaciated form like a bobtailed bath-robe.

The greatest blight which old age had left upon his dignified form was in his eyes: the vacant, age-dimmed stare of second childhood, denoting that reason no longer sat regnant upon the crystal throne of the intellect.

There were many tables in the eating-house, but Popsy could not command his mind and his judgment to the point of deciding which table he would choose or in which chair he would seat himself.

Shin Bone, from the rear of his restaurant, looked up and gave a grunt of disgust.

“Dar’s dat ole fool come back agin,” he growled. “Ef you’d set him in one of dese here revolver chairs, he wouldn’t hab sense enough to turn around in it. I reckon I’ll hab to go an’ sell him a plate of soup.”

“Mawnin’, Popsy,” he said cordially, as he walked to the door where the old man stood. Shin reserved a private opinion of all his patrons, but outwardly he was very courteous to all of them, for very good business reasons.

“Mawnin’, Shinny,” Popsy said with a sighing respiration. “I wus jes’ tryin’ to reckoleck whut I come in dis place fur an’ whar must I set down at.”

“I reckin you better set down up close to de kitchen, whar you kin smell de vittles. Dat’ll git you more fer yo’ money,” Shin snickered. “I reckin you is hankerin’ atter a bowl of soup, ain’t you?”

“I b’lieve dat wuz whut I come in dis place fer. I’s gittin’ powerful fergitful as de days goes by.”

“You comes in here mighty nigh eve’y day fer a bowl of soup,” Shin told him. “Is you fergot dat fack?”

“Is dat possible?” Popsy exclaimed. “I muss be spendin’ my money too free.”

“You needn’t let dat worry yo’ mind,” Shin replied, as he motioned to a negro waitress to bring the soup. “You ain’t got nobody to suppote but yo’ own self.”

“Figger Bush lives wid me,” Popsy growled. “He oughter he’p suppote me some, but he won’t do it. He wuz always a most onreliable pickaninny, an’ all de good I ever got out of him I had to beat out wid a stick.”

“Figger’s wife oughter git some wuck out of him,” Shin laughed.

“She cain’t do it! Excusin’ dat, she ain’t home right now. Dat’s how come I’s got to eat wid you,” Popsy grumbled, digging the tine of his fork into the soft pine table to accentuate his remarks, and then flourishing the fork in the air for emphasis. “Figger is de lazies’ nigger in de worl’.”

Having uttered this remark, the old man leaned back in his chair and thrust the fork into his coat pocket while his aged eyes stared out of the window at nothing. Shin noted the disappearance of the fork, but did not mention it. The negro waitress appeared, placed the soup under the old man’s nose and went away. At last he glanced down.

“Fer de Lawd’s sake!” he exclaimed. “Whar did dis here soup come from?”

“You jes’ now ordered it,” Shin said sharply. “I had a cullud gal fotch it to you, an’ you got to pay fer it.”

“I won’t pay for it ontil atter I done et it,” Popsy growled.

He picked up a knife, started to dip it into the soup, found that this was the wrong tool, and thrust the knife into the pocket of his coat to keep company with the purloined fork.

Shin noted the disappearance of the knife, but said nothing. He handed Popsy a pewter spoon and remarked:

“You better lap it up quick, Popsy; she’ll be gittin’ cold in a minute.”

“Who’ll be gittin’ cold?” Popsy asked absently. “I didn’t hear tell of no she havin’ a cold. Is she got a rigger? Dese here spring days draws out all de p’ison in de blood.”

“Naw, suh. I says de soup will git cold.”

“Aw,” Popsy answered, as he dipped his spoon in the liquid and sipped it. “Dis soup am pretty tol’able good. Does you chaw yo’ vittles fawty times, Shinny?”

“Not de same vittles,” Shin said. “I chaws mo’ dan fawty times at a meal, I reckin.”

“Marse Tom Gaitskill says dat people oughter chaw deir vittles fawty times befo’ dey swallows it.”

“I’d hate to practise on a oystyer,” Shin giggled. “White folks is always talkin’ fool notions.”

Shin sat by and watched the old man as he consumed the remainder of his soup in silence. He also ate some crackers, drank a cup of coffee, to all appearances unconscious that Shin sat beside him. Finally, he looked up with a slightly surprised manner and asked:

“Whut did you say to me, Shinny?”

“I said I’d hate to practise on oystyers.”

“Practise whut on oystyers?”

“Chawin’ one fawty times,” Shin explained.

“My gawsh!” Popsy snorted. “Who ever heard tell of anybody in his real good sense chawin’ a raw oystyer fawty times? Is you gone crippled in yo’ head?”

“Naw, suh, I——”

The old man did not wait for the reply, but interrupted by rising to his feet with the intention of going out. The spoon he was holding he did not lay down upon the table, but carried it toward the door with him.

“De price is fifteen cents, Popsy,” Shin reminded him, as he followed him toward the front. “Let me hold yo’ spoon while you feels fer yo’ money.”

“I didn’t fotch no spoon wid me,” the old man whined, as he held it out to Shin. “Dis spoon is your’n.”

He paid the money to Shin, and started toward the door again, when he was once more intercepted.

“Lemme fix de collar of yo’ coat, brudder,” Shin suggested.

He seized the old man by the shoulders, shook the loose coat on his thin shoulders, and pretended to fit it around his wrinkled neck; at the same time, he thrust his hand into the coat pocket and extracted the purloined knife and fork.

Popsy never missed them. In fact, he did not know that he had them. Shin handed him his patriarchal staff and gave him a slight push toward the door.

At that moment Mustard Prophet stood at the entrance, “Is you ready to go out, Popsy?” Mustard asked cordially, as he shook hands.

“Dar now!” Popsy snorted. “I knowed I come in dis place fer some puppus, but I couldn’t think whut it wus. I promised to meet Mustard here. He’s gwine take me out to his house to dinner, an’ I’m done went an’ et!”

“Dat’s no diffunce, Popsy,” Mustard chuckled. “You’ll be hongry agin by de time you gits out to de Nigger-Heel.”

Popsy stopped beside the wagon and stared in pop-eyed amazement at the white boy who sat with his feet hanging out of the rear end.

“Befo’ Gawd!” the old man bawled. “Dar’s little Jimmy Gaitskill dat I ain’t seed fer sixty year’!”

“You’s gwine back too fur, Popsy,” Mustard laughed. “Dat’s Marse Jimmy Gaitskill’s grandchile.”

“Huh,” the old man grunted, as Mustard helped him to a seat in the wagon. “De Gaitskills look de same all over de worl’.”

“How does dey look, Popsy?” Mustard chuckled.

“Dey’s got de look of eagles,” Popsy replied.

Shin watched the wagon until it disappeared around a turn in the road. His eyes were on Popsy’s bent form as far as he could see it.

“Dat’s de biggest bat I ever knowed,” Shin remarked to the world as he turned back and entered his place of business.

III

THE RABBIT-FOOT

Two hours later, Mustard Prophet stopped his wagon in the horse-lot of the Nigger-Heel plantation.

“Dis is whar you mounts down, Popsy,” he said.

“Whut does I git off here fer?” Popsy asked querulously.

“Gawd knows,” Mustard grinned. “I done fotch you out to de plantation as by per yo’ own request. Dis is it.”

He lifted the aged man down and walked with him to the house, making slow progress as the old man supported himself with his staff and insisted on stopping at frequent intervals to discuss some vagary of his mind, or to dispute something that Mustard had said.

At last Mustard assisted him to a chair on the porch and handed him a glass of water.

“Glad to hab you-alls out here wid me, Popsy,” he proclaimed. “Set down an’ rest yo’ hat and foots.”

“I ain’t seed de Nigger-Heel plantation fer nigh onto fifty year,” Popsy whined. “I used to wuck on dis plantation off an’ on when I wus a growin’ saplin’.”

“Dis place is changed some plenty since you used to potter aroun’ it,” Mustard said pridefully. “Marse Tom specify dat dis am one of de show-farms of all Louzanny. I made it jes’ whut it is now.”

“Dis ole house is ’bout all I reckernizes real good,” Popsy replied. “It ain’t changed much.”

“Naw, suh. I don’t let dis house git changed. Marse Tom lived here a long time, an’ when he moved to town I’s kinder kep’ de house like it wus when he lef’ it, only sorter made it like his’n in Tickfall. Marse Tom is gwine lemme live here till I dies. He tole me dat hisse’f.”

“It shore is nice to hab a good home,” Popsy said, looking vacantly toward the near-by woods, where he could hear the loud shouts of Little Bit and Orren Randolph Gaitskill.

“Would you wish to see de insides of de house?” Mustard asked. “I got eve’ything plain an’ simple, but it’s fine an’ dandy fer a nigger whose wife ain’t never out here to keep house. Hopey cooks fer Marse Tom, an’ I got to take keer of things by myse’f.”

“It’s real nice not to hab no lady folks snoopin’ aroun’ de place,” Popsy asserted. “Dey blim-blams you all de time about spittin’ on de flo’ an’ habin’ muddy foots.”

They walked about the house inspecting it. Popsy followed Mustard about, listening inattentively to Mustard’s talk, wondering what it was all about. He came to one room which attracted his attention because it looked as though it held the accumulated junk of years.

“Whut you keep all dis trash in dis room fer, Mustard?”

“Dis ain’t trash. Dese here is Marse Tom’s curiosities,” Mustard explained. “Dis is like a show—all kinds of funny things in here.”

The old man stepped within the room, and Mustard began to act as showman, displaying and expatiating upon all the interesting things of the place.

The room bore a remote resemblance to a museum. When Gaitskill had first moved on the plantation, nearly fifty years before, he had amused himself by making a collection of the things he found upon the farm and in the woods, which interested him or took his fancy. For instance, here was a vine which was twisted so that it resembled a snake. That was all there was to it. Because it looked like a snake, Gaitskill had picked it up and brought it to the house and added it to his collection.

Stuff of this sort had accumulated in that room for years. Mustard had no use for the room. Gaitskill had not needed it before him. When the overseer moved in, he had zealously guarded Marse Tom’s curiosities. As for Colonel Gaitskill, he did not even know the trash was in existence.

Mustard had added to the accumulation through the years. Now and then, in his work in the fields or woods, he would find something that reminded him of something that Marse Tom had “saved” in that room, so he would bring it in and add that to the pile.

So now Mustard had something to talk to Popsy about, and he talked Popsy to the verge of distraction, proclaiming all sorts of fanciful reasons for the preservation of each curious object. The old man was bored as he had never been bored in all his life. His feeble form began to droop with weariness, his mind failed to grasp the words which Mustard pronounced with such unction, but Mustard did not notice, and would not have minded if he had observed Popsy’s inattention. He intoned his words impressively and talked on and on.

At last Mustard opened a drawer and drew out a small, green-plush box. He opened this box with impressive gestures, as if it was some sacred object to be handled with extreme reverence. He held the opened box under Popsy Spout’s nose.

“Dat’s de greatest treasure we’s got in dis house, Popsy,” he announced.

“Whut am dat?” Popsy asked, rallying his scattered wits.

“Dat’s de royal rabbit-foot whut fotch all de luck to de Nigger-Heel plantation,” Mustard proclaimed. “Marse Tom gimme dat foot fifteen years ago. He said dat all his luck come from dat foot. He tole me to keep it an’ it would fotch good luck to me. It shore has done it.”

Popsy gazed down into the plush box. What he saw was a rabbit-foot with a silver cap on one end, and in the center of the cap was a small ring which might be used to hang the rabbit-foot on a watch-chain if one cared to possess such a watch-charm.

A few years ago the rabbit-foot novelty was for sale in any jewelry store in the South, and cost about one dollar. Because of the negro superstition regarding the luck of the rabbit’s foot, Gaitskill had bought one for his negro overseer.

The white man in the South in his dealings with the negroes is never skeptical of their favorite superstitions. In presenting the rabbit-foot to Mustard, Gaitskill had drawn upon his imagination and told a wonderful story of the efficacy of this particular luck-charm. He had been lost in the swamp, so Gaitskill said, and this foot had shown him the way out; he had fallen into the Gulf of Mexico, and this foot had saved his life; he had been poor, and now he was rich; he had been sick, and now he was well; he had been young, and now he was old—and all because of the luck of that particular rabbit-foot. All of this emphasized in Mustard’s mind the importance which Gaitskill attached to the possession of the foot, and made him believe that the white man only parted with it because he wanted his favorite negro overseer to share some of the good fortune which had come to him.

The tale had so impressed Mustard that he regarded that plush box with its sacred foot as being the most valuable thing upon the Nigger-Heel plantation. He guarded it constantly, and would have protected it from theft or injury with his life.

“Dat is puffeckly wonderful,” Mustard declared, gazing at the treasure with reverent eyes.

“Yes, suh, dat’s whut,” Popsy agreed dreamily “Le’s hunt some place to set down.”

IV

BLACK IS BLACK

In the meantime, Orren Randolph Gaitskill was out in the woods, getting acquainted with Little Bit. He asked many questions, and in a brief time he thought he knew all about his companion. Then he made a discovery, so unexpected, so overwhelming, that it terrified him and sent him through the woods and up to the house, squalling like a monkey.

“Dar’s a dandy swimmin’-hole over by dat cypress-tree, Marse Org,” Little Bit remarked.

“I ain’t been swimming since I left the Pacific Ocean,” was Org’s reply as he started in a run toward the designated spot.

As he ran, he began to shed his clothes. His hat dropped off first because that was easiest to remove, then his tie, after that his shirt was jerked off and cast aside. He could have been trailed from the starting point to the bayou by the clothes he left behind him. On the edge of the water he hopped out of his remaining garments and plunged head-first into the stream.

Ten seconds later, he rose to the surface shaking the water out of his eyes. It had taken Little Bit just that much longer to undress. At that moment, Little Bit leaped into the water, arms and legs outspread, his purpose being to make as much splash as possible.

He made a big splash, but he made a bigger sensation.

When Org saw that black object coming into the water after him, he got out of there. With a terrified shriek he splashed to the bank, scrambled up the muddy, slippery edge, and ran squalling across the woods toward the plantation-house.

Little Bit was mystified and terrified. He followed the shrieking white boy through the woods. Org ran into the open field, uttering a terrified wail at each jump. His fright became contagious, and while Little Bit did not have the least idea what it was all about, he added his wails to Org’s lamentations, and the woods echoed with the sounds of woe.

They scrambled over the fence and into the yard and ran screaming up the steps and into the house, just as Popsy had suggested that they hunt a place to sit down.

Mustard ran into the hall and confronted two boys, naked as the day they were born, both screaming at the top of their voices.

“Shut up, you idjit chillun!” Mustard howled. “Whut de debbil ails you? Whar is yo’-all’s clothes at?”

The terrified white boy ran to Mustard, threw both arms around his waist, and buried his face in Mustard’s coat-tail to shut out the awful sight. But he did not stop his screaming.

“Hey, you brats!” Mustard whooped. “Shut up yo’ heads! Whut you howlin’ about? Hush!”

Both boys suddenly stopped screaming, and there was a moment of silence. Mustard waited for them to get their breath and explain. All sorts of things had happened in Mustard’s variegated career, but this was new, to have two boys come prancing into his house without a stitch of clothes on their bodies, both screaming like maniacs. Little Bit was the first to catch his breath and speak.

“Whut ails you, Marse Org?” he asked in that soft, drawling, pathetic tone, whose minor note is the heritage of generations of servile ancestors. “Is a snake done bit you? Is you done fall straddle of a allergater when you jumped in de water? How come you ack dis-a-way?”

These questions served as a sufficient explanation to Mustard for their lack of clothes. Something had frightened them while they were swimming in the bayou.

Org opened his eyes and peeped around Mustard’s hip at Little Bit. Then he stepped aside and took a long look at the colored boy’s ebony body.

“Why, Little Bit,” Org exclaimed, “you are black all over your body!”

“Suttinly,” Little Bit agreed heartily. “I’s black as de bottom of a deep hole in de night-time. I’s a real cullud pusson, I is.”

“But—but—I thought you would be white under your clothes,” Org exclaimed.

“Naw, suh, I ain’t never been no color but black, inside an’ out, on top an’ down under,” Little Bit chuckled.

“But you said you were the cap’ns white nigger,” Org argued.

“Dat don’t mean white in color,” Little Bit explained. “De cap’n, he jes’ calls me dat because I remembers my raisin’ an’ does my manners an’ acks white.”

“It ’pears to me like you boys is bofe fergot yo’ raisin’ an’ yo’ manners,” Mustard snorted. “Whut you mean by comin’ up to my house as naked as a new-hatched jay-bird? ’Spose dey wus lady folks in dis house—whut dey ain’t, bless Gawd! Wouldn’t you two pickaninnies cut a caper runnin’ aroun’ here wid nothin’ on but yo’selfs an’ yo’ own skins?”

“I was so scared I left my clothes on the creek,” Org explained shamefacedly.

“I’ll go back wid you-alls. I don’t b’lieve you bofe got sense enough to find yo’ gyarments,” Mustard grumbled. “Whar wus you-all swimmin’ at?”

As the three walked out, Popsy Spout stood for a moment, his vacant eyes wandering over a room full of the most astounding accumulation of junk any collector ever assembled. It all meant nothing to Popsy. He was tired, awfully tired. The ride from town had wearied him, Mustard’s talk had wearied him, the pickaninnies on the plantation seemed to make a lot of noise. A long time ago he had asked Mustard to find him some place to sit down. He decided he would prefer to lie down. He needed rest and calm.

But Mustard was gone somewhere. He could hear his bawling voice getting farther away from the house all the time. He might be gone for a long time. He couldn’t sit down on that pile of junk. So Popsy walked feebly to the door and stood looking into the hall.

As he put his hand up to the door-jamb to support himself, he discovered that he was holding something. It was a green-plush box. He wondered what the box was. It was probably something, he could not remember what.

He put the box in the pocket of his coat, found a rocking chair, sat down and went to sleep.

V

THE PLUSH BOX

Org walked back to the bayou under the escort of Mustard Prophet. He seemed unable to take his eyes off of Little Bit’s shiny black skin. He was slow to overcome his amazement at his discovery that a negro was black all over.

When they were riding home in big Mustard’s farm-wagon, he referred to it again.

“You’re a negro, ain’t you, Little Bit?” he asked, speaking in a softly apologetic tone, as if fearing to cause offense.

“Suttin!” Little Bit laughed. “I’s a black Affikin nigger. Anybody dat looks how dark complected I is kin see dat.”

“I never saw many colored persons in my life,” Org explained.

“You ain’t had no eyes ef you ain’t seed no niggers,” Little Bit chuckled. “Niggers is eve’ywhar. Gawd made ’em in de night, made ’em in a hurry an’ fergot to make ’em white. Dar’s niggers in heaven, an’ dars even plenty niggers in hell.”

At the Shin Bone eating-house, Mustard helped Popsy Spout down from the wagon and the two boys jumped to the ground. Popsy entered the restaurant, walked feebly over to a table and seated himself with a thankful sigh. He took out his pipe and placed it upon the table at his elbow, then spread a red bandana handkerchief over his head to keep the flies from disturbing him. Then he sank into a restful state of dreamy inanity, his mind just as near empty as it is possible for anything to be, considering the fact that nature abhors a vacuum.

In one corner of the room, the proprietor, Shin Bone, was engaged in some interesting experiments with loaded dice. He seemed never weary of his task as he rolled the cubes across the table, retrieved them again, and repeated. He tried to familiarize himself with their vagaries, to study their oddities and eccentricities, and in his imagination he planned many victories and great winnings through the aid of these pet bones.

The process was absorbing to him. His eyes popped out, the whites showing in a wide ring. His breathing was quick and husky as he shook the dice, and he muttered prayers and imprecations and incantations. Sometimes he threw the dice with one hand, sometimes with the other; he used certain luck charms, changing them from one pocket to the other, practising and experimenting with every sort of “conjure,” for he expected those little white cubes with the black spots to bring him the money with which to make a loud noise in Tickfall colored society.

Popsy roused himself from his dreamy vacuity and felt in his pocket for his tobacco-pouch. He would take a little smoke before dinner. He found the tobacco-pouch, also something else.

He brought forth a green-plush box and looked at it curiously. He opened it with hands which shook from senile palsy and examined its contents. It was a rabbit-foot surmounted with a silver cap on one end. He wondered where he had acquired the thing.

“Come here, Shinny!” he called. “Look whut I done found on myse’f.”

Shin Bone crossed the room, gazed at the treasure for a moment, and gave a surprised grunt.

“Whar did you git dis rabbit-foot?” he inquired suspiciously.

“I dunno, Shinny,” the old man replied in a complaining voice. “Whut is it fur?”

“Lots of folks has rabbit-foots,” Shin said. “I don’t b’lieve in ’em. I got four, an’ dey don’t fotch me no luck. Whar did you git dis’n?”

“I dunno.”

“Whar you been at to-day?” Shin asked.

“Well, suh, early dis mawnin’ I went to de Shoofly chu’ch an’ conversed de Revun Vinegar Atts a little; atter dat, I went out to de Nigger-Heel wid Mustard Prophet—ah—dat’s whar I got dis here foot. Mustard gib it to me. He esplained a whole lot about it an’ tole me dat Marse Tom gib it to him, an’ he passed it on.”

“Whut yo gwine do wid it?” Shin asked.

“’Tain’t no good to me,” Popsy whined, working at his tobacco-pouch and shaking some tobacco in his hand. “De only luck-charm I b’lieves in is de chu’ch. Ef de good Lawd is on yo’ side, who kin be agin you?”

Shin Bone knew better than to get Popsy started in a discussion of religion. His conversation on that theme was interminable. Besides, the plush box lying on the table between them had awakened several interesting trains of thought:

First, he knew Popsy had a trick of putting things into his pocket and walking off with them, forgetting where he acquired them, and even failing to remember what they were for. Second, he remembered that Mustard Prophet had often attributed much of his good fortune to the possession of a rabbit-foot. Thirdly, he knew that Colonel Gaitskill also had a rabbit-foot, for he had often heard him refer to it in his hearing and in the presence of the other negroes.

Now, did Popsy inadvertently take possession of Gaitskill’s rabbit-foot? Or did he absent-mindedly walk off with Mustard’s foot? Or did Mustard give his famous luck-charm away? Shin doubted this last supposition. If a luck-charm is good, it is very, very good. Or did Mustard steal Gaitskill’s rabbit-foot and Popsy take it from Mustard?

Popsy lighted his pipe and began to smoke. Shin Bone decided that he could make nothing of the mystery. A rabbit-foot was no good to him. He had tried them before. But loaded dice, now—he pulled the “bones” from his pocket and renewed his former operations.

In the kitchen a bell rang. A number of patrons who had been lingering outside came through the door and seated themselves at the table. Shin Bone arose to bring in the dinner. Popsy knocked the ashes from his pipe and got ready to eat.

As for Org and Little Bit, they did not get back to the Gaitskill home until the sun had sunk below the line of the tree-tops. And not until Orren Randolph Gaitskill beheld his sister sitting upon the porch did he think of the errand on which she had sent him ten hours before.

His small hand investigated his trouser-pocket, to see if he was still in possession of the fifty-cent piece. He might have lost it when he tossed aside his garments on the banks of the Cooley bayou.

“Org!” Virginia called sharply. “Where are those stamps?”

Org’s nervous fingers caressed the half-dollar in his pocket. His mind reached out like the tentacles of an octopus, grasping after an excuse.

“Where are my stamps?” she repeated.

“Er—ah—I went down-town,” Org began. “I went down-town—and—er—ah—Miss Paunee, that mustang woman in the post-office—she told me—she said——”

“Well?” Virginia’s tone was icy.

“Miss Paunee—she told me—ah—she said she didn’t have no two-cent stamps; she had sold out.”

If the glance of a sister’s eye could kill, most brothers would now be dead. Org survived the look she gave him, and sheepishly offered her the fifty-cent piece.

“You don’t need no stamps, Gince,” Org said soothingly. “Them guys you left behind ain’t worth writing letters to.”

“Please keep your opinions to yourself,” his sister advised. “Where have you spent the day?”

“I have been to the Nigger-Heel plantation with Little Bit. Little Bit is a colored person and a very good friend. A colored man named Mustard took me out in a wagon and brought me back,” Org informed her. Then eagerly: “Say, Gince, do you know that a negro is black all over his body, even under his clothes?”

“Where did you meet these blacks?” Virginia asked, avoiding Org’s question as to the color-line.

“I met Little Bit at the foot of the hill. He told me he was the captain’s white negro. I met Mustard Prophet in front of the Hen-Scratch saloon in Dirty-Six. We picked up Popsy Spout at Shin Bone’s hot-cat stand in Hell’s Half-Acre!”

Under this appalling summary of information, Miss Virginia reeled back in dismay.

“No doubt,” she said weakly.

“If you want to save stamps, Gince,” Org suggested eagerly, “you better write to Little Bit’s captain and let me carry the notes for you. I saw the captain when we were coming home. He’s got a’ automobile as big as a street-car. He was in the army and a German shot him——”

A slight flush appeared on Miss Virginia’s cheek. It spread slowly, like the unfurling of some flag—the star-spangled banner for instance.

“I don’t care to hear the personal history of the acquaintances you have made to-day,” Miss Virginia interrupted.

“His name is Captain Kerley Kerlerac, Gince,” Org persisted. “Little Bit told me. Little Bit, my colored friend, is the captain’s pet coon.”

In Tickfall, religion was reduced to the least common divisor. That is to say, there was one church for the white people and one for the black. The white children felt that they were imposed upon by the older and more dominating members of their families in that they were made to go to Sunday-school, whereas, the black children were permitted by their parents to grow up in that ignorance which is bliss.

Org had no particular love for religious instruction. All the time that he was trying to learn a sufficient portion of that day’s lesson to satisfy his teacher, he was thinking of a buzzard’s nest which Little Bit had told him about, a buzzard’s nest which contained two baby buzzards, both of them white as snow. If that buzzard’s nest had been concealed in some Sunday-school book—but Org never found anything interesting in a Sunday-school book. What little he knew of that day’s portion of the Scripture had been imparted to him by the laborious efforts of his sister, and he was now walking down the hill toward the church, mumbling his newly acquired information to himself.

“Whar you gwine, Marse Org?”

“Sunday-school. Come and go with me.”

“Ain’t fitten,” Little Bit giggled. “A little black coon like me ain’t got no place in a white chu’ch. Excusin’ dat, I janitors in a saloon, an’ Sunday-schools ain’t made fer such.”

“I’ll tell you all I know about the lesson,” Org urged. “Listen: Methusalem—oldest man ever was: nine hundred and sixty-nine years old—was not, for God took him—gathered to his fathers——”

“How ole you say he wus gwine on when he died?” Little Bit asked.

“Nine hundred and sixty-nine years.”

“Whoop-ee! Whut did de ole gizzard die of when he died?”

“I dunno,” Org replied. “He died of smoking cigarettes, I reckon. If you go with me, we’ll ask the teacher.”

“I mought stan’ outside behime de chu’ch while you axed,” Little Bit said doubtfully. “Who am dis here teacher?”

“Captain Kerley Kerlerac.”

“I ain’t gwine to no Sonday-school to ax my boss nothin’,” Little Bit said positively. “Dat white man don’t ’low no niggers to pesticate him wid ’terrogations. I knows!”

Org was not willing to part with his companion. He could have a great deal more fun with Little Bit than he could contemplating the career of a man who had lived nearly a thousand years and had been dead for several thousand more. Besides, he was a little skeptical of the alleged age of that old party. So when Org came to a corner where he should have turned to the right, he turned to the left, and from that time on there was a vacant chair in the Sunday-school.

The old cotton-shed on the edge of the Gaitskill sand pit was the first thing to attract the attention of the pair. In that storehouse, they found an old cotton-truck, and a door which had been torn off the hinges and was lying on the floor near the office.

They found amusement for a while by pulling each other around on the truck. Then they sat down in the door to cool off and gazed out over an expanse of water which formed a shallow pond in the sand pit.

“If we could get this old broken-down door over to that pond, we could have a raft to ride on,” Org remarked.

“’Tain’t no trouble,” Little Bit replied. “Jes’ load de door onto de cotton-truck an’ push de truck down to de pond.”

“You are certainly intell’gent, Little Bit,” Org exclaimed admiringly as he sprang to his feet.

“Pushin’ things an’ liftin’ things an’ loadin’ things—dat’s a cullud pusson’s nachel-bawn job,” Little Bit chuckled. “’Tain’t no trouble fer a nigger to think up dat.”

“Let’s get this door on the truck and move our raft,” Org urged.

It was not hard to do. The pine door was not very heavy, and from the time they got it out of the building, the route was down hill to the edge of the pond. They pushed the truck into the water, easily floated the door off, and then tugged mightily to drag the truck back to the empty storehouse again.

They found two long poles which would serve to steer with, and raced back to the edge of the pond and climbed aboard their raft.

The door sustained them just as long as most of their weight was on their poles, and they were trying to push off. At last they worked their raft out to about four feet of water and felt free to lift their steering-poles and ride.

Then that door slowly sank under their weight until the water was up to their knees, to their waists, to their shoulders. It stopped in its downward journey when it rested on the sandy bottom, and the two lads stood on it, looking at each other with the utmost astonishment, raising their chins to keep the water out of their mouths.

“You done got yo’ nice Sunday clothes all wet,” Little Bit sighed.

“Yours are wet, too,” Org retorted.

“Dis here is my eve’y-day suit. I ain’t got no all-Sonday gyarments. I wears dese ladylike clothes all de time.”

“I’m sorry you spoilt your only suit,” Org sympathized.

“’Tain’t spiled—it’s jes’ wet,” Little Bit replied. “Whut is us gwine do now?”

“We’re both wet. We might as well have a good time,” Org suggested philosophically.

“I likes good times an’ dis’n is started off real good,” Little Bit laughed. “You git offen dis ole door an’ le’s see ef it will hold me up.”

VII

LOST BOYS

About four o’clock that afternoon somebody in the Gaitskill home asked where Orren Randolph Gaitskill was. He had not been seen since he left the house that morning to attend the Sunday-school.

Miss Virginia Gaitskill called Captain Kerley Kerlerac on the telephone and asked if Orren had been in his class that morning.

When a devilish boy happens to be the brother of an angelic girl, even a disillusioned war-veteran finds that lad possessed of qualities which he loves and admires for the boy’s sister’s sake.

Kerlerac informed her that he had missed Orren very much, that he was the brightest boy in his class, that all the others had made anxious inquiry about him, that he was about to call at the Gaitskill home to inquire if Orren was sick.

The answer which he heard to this panegyric was a giggle.

“Hello! Hello! What’s that?” he exclaimed.

The telephone clicked in his ear, indicating that she had hung up the receiver.

Kerley stood at the telephone scratching his head, a wry smile on his lips.

“I believe that giggle meant that she called me a liar,” he announced to his immortal soul. A reminiscent light beamed in his eyes. “She hasn’t changed in the past fifteen years—little spitfire!”

For half an hour Miss Virginia found something else to think about besides her wandering brother, but as the evening wore on, and he did not appear, she began to get uneasy again.

“That dang boy has played hookey and gone out in the woods with that pickaninny,” Colonel Gaitskill announced.

“Oh, maybe he’s lost in the swamp!” Virginia gasped.

“No danger of that,” Gaitskill said easily. “These little niggers around here can go across that swamp like a fox. They can’t get lost.”

But as the shadows lengthened across the Gaitskill lawn the women of the household were thrown into a panic. They insisted that it was not a natural or ordinary thing for Orren to miss his meals; that a hungry boy might be having a very good time at some amusement, but he would always be willing to postpone his play to eat, resuming his play after this meal.

“That’s so,” Gaitskill admitted. “When I was a boy nothing was ever more attractive to me than the consumption of food, and I enjoy being regular at my meals now. But, maybe he ate his lunch somewhere else?”

By telephone they made inquiry of every place where they thought Orren could have eaten. He had not been seen at any of those places.

Gaitskill saw that he was going to have to get out and hunt that boy. The prospect did not appeal to him. That boy was a nuisance. If he was lost, it was good riddance. He wasn’t worth finding—let him find himself. He went to the telephone and called up Captain Kerley Kerlerac.

“Say, Kerl, where’s that damn little pet nigger of yours?”

“Haven’t seen him to-day, Colonel.”

“He’s run off somewhere with Orren, and Orren hasn’t come home yet.”

“I’ll find him,” Kerley said eagerly.

“Oh, no! Don’t trouble yourself,” Gaitskill smiled. “I just wanted to know about Little Bit.”

Gaitskill sat down with a sly grin. He was getting old, he reflected, and the strenuous life was no longer attractive. If a searching party should have to be organized, he had now laid its foundation. It was a certainty that Kerlerac would organize the party and lead the search. Good old Kerl would see that Virginia’s brother was not lost.

It does not take a rumor long to spread over a little village. In a brief time, it was known to the remotest parts of Tickfall that Little Bit and Orren Gaitskill were lost.

Little Bit’s mother, in spite of the fact that she had fourteen others just like him in her cabin, aroused all the negro section of the town by her frantic wails. She announced in a voice like a calliope that she knew that her angel child had fallen into a well, had been eaten by an alligator, had been bitten by a snake, had been drowned in a bayou, had been stolen and carried away by white folks, had been lost in the swamp—and she howled like a banshee over each one of these possibilities, and others of the same general nature as she thought of them.

A great bellow of excitement went up from all the negroes, and a band of them hurried to the home of Captain Kerlerac to inquire the latest information about Little Bit. Their excitement was contagious, and the captain caught it, the white citizens of the town were inoculated, and in an incredibly short time the town was seething with an intense desire to organize a search-party and explore the woods for the lost boys.

“We’ll wait until night, men,” Kerlerac said. “If the boys don’t come in by dark, we will go out on the Little Moccasin Road and build fires on the highway for ten miles. Wherever they may be in the swamp, they will see that trail of fire and come to it.”

“That’s the way to do it,” several approving voices spoke.

“Don’t bother Colonel Gaitskill with it,” Kerley suggested. “He’s getting too old to be running around at night and exposing himself. If the boys don’t come in by dark, I will ring the court-house bell. Meet me there.”

It had not been very long since Kerlerac had been a boy himself. He knew every spot in that vicinity which was dear to boys, white and black. He listed each one in his mind and started on a lone search to each of these places.

His automobile carried him first to all the swimming-holes, then to the old picnic-grounds, then to the old tabernacle, where the negro camp-meetings were held, to the pool where the colored members of the Shoofly church conducted their baptizings, to the old stables and sheds around the fair-grounds. Finally, he left his machine beside the road and walked across the field to the old cotton-shed beside the sand pit.

The noise of shouting and laughter came to him before he arrived upon the scene. It was no trouble to locate the two boys as they splashed and paddled and fought with water and dived to the bottom to rise with a handful of sand to throw at each other.

Time had ceased to move for those two youngsters. Sunrise and sunset were just the same to them. A score of apple-cores strewn along the sandy shore indicated that they had lunched well and were not hungry.

“Hey, you!” Kerley called.

The two boys looked up with surprise.

“Come out of that water!” Kerley commanded. “Don’t you know it is nearly night?”

The astonishment on their faces when informed of the passage of time indicated that they had been completely engrossed with their amusement.

They climbed out of the water near Kerlerac and gave that gentleman a surprise.

“You’ve both got on your clothes!” he exclaimed. “Are you too lazy to strip when you take a Sunday swim?”

“Naw, suh. But our fust swim wus a mistake, Marse Cap’n,” Little Bit chattered, chilled by the wind after his day of activity in the water. “Us got on a raff an’ de raff wouldn’t hol’ us up.”

“Don’t report to me,” Kerley laughed. “March along home now! Right face! Forward!”

A little later Kerlerac marched the two wet youngsters upon the lawn and made them stand at attention in the presence of a dozen hysterical women.

“Here are your mud-cats, Colonel,” he smiled. “I found them paddling in the pond in the old sand pit.”

“I didn’t intend to get wet, Uncle Tom,” Org began, “but the raft was not large enough——”

“That’s enough for you,” Gaitskill cut him off. “Go around to the rear of the house.”

Miss Virginia Gaitskill stood upon the steps smiling.

“I think I knew you once, Miss Gaitskill,” Kerlerac said. “We were both younger then.”

“You were seven and I was five,” Virginia smiled, as she extended her hand.

“I remember,” Kerlerac answered. “You gave me a chocolate rat with a rubber tail. I could hold the tail and bounce the rat, or I could lay the rat down and watch it wiggle its tail very lifelike. I ate that rat, rubber-tail and all.”

“You gave me a rabbit-foot in a green-plush box,” Virginia laughed. “I did not eat the foot or the box. I have them both yet.”

“I have something that you did not give me,” Kerlerac said earnestly. “I stole it from you. I carried it through three battles across the sea. It is your picture as you were then.”

“Have I changed since then?” the girl asked, because she did not know what else to say.

“Yes. The photograph I have of you shows a little spitfire girl astride of a wabble-wheeled velocipede.”

“Oh—” that young lady gasped.

A moving-picture of the performances of Mustard Prophet when he discovered the loss of his rabbit-foot would be a valuable contribution to the silent drama. Alone in that big plantation-house, with no one to talk to, he spluttered with language like an erupting volcano, and cut as many capers as a cat having a fit.

After that he mounted the fastest horse on his plantation and rode to town, sweeping down upon his wife like a cyclone of wrath and fear and consternation.

“Dat ole bat stole dat rabbit-foot,” Mustard bellowed.

“I don’t b’lieve it,” Hopey replied, trying to soothe him. “Dat’s a good ole man.”

“He’s a good ole stealer,” Mustard howled. “He knows how to rob de hen-roost an’ hide de feathers. Lawd, when I think how heavy he sets in de amen cornder of de Shoofly meetin’-house, singin’ religion toons an’ foolin’ de people all de time—I tell you dat nigger ought to be churched!”

“But I don’t see what he wanted to take dat rabbit-foot fer,” Hopey declared. “He’s tole me plenty times dat he didn’t b’lieve in foots; he b’lieves in faith.”

“It’s wuth a thousan’ dollars—dat how come he took it!” Mustard bawled. “Mebbe it’s wuth a millyum; how does I know? Marse Tom, he’s got it all fixed up wid silver trimmin’s an’ in a plush box. Dat ain’t no cheap, common, nigger rabbit-foot. Dat’s a royal rabbit-foot, an’ it fotch Marse Tom all de luck he ever had. He tole me dat his own self.”

“Why don’t you go to Popsy an’ ax him fer it?”

“Dat ole lyin’ thief will say he ain’t got it, an’ ain’t never had it, an’ don’t know nothin’ about it,” Mustard wailed. “Atter dat, whar is I at?”

“Tell him dat it b’longs to Marse Tom, an’ you want it back,” Hopey urged.

“Yep. An’ dat ole gizzard will swell up an’ sw’ar he ain’t got nothin’ of Marse Tom’s an’ offer to go down to de bank an’ prove it befo’ Marse Tom’s own face. I don’t dast let Marse Tom know I done loss dat rabbit-foot. De kunnel would kill me dead!”

“I never thought of dat,” Hopey sighed.

“You don’t think about nothin’,” Mustard wailed. “Here I is in de wuss mess I’m ever got into, an’ you ain’t think about nothin’. Look at dis here jam. If Marse Tom finds out I loss de rabbit-foot, he’ll kill me; ef I ax dat ole Popsy-sneak to gib it back, mebbe he’ll blab dat it’s lost, an’ Marse Tom will hear about it, an’ I’ll git kilt jes’ de same. Anyhow, dat foot is plum’ gone an’——”

“Why don’t you git somebody to git it back fer you?” Hopey asked. “Ef Popsy stole it, it ’pears to me like somebody oughter be able to steal it back.”

“Suttinly, ef dey kin find it,” Mustard said, the light of new hope shining in his eyes. “I’d gib somebody one hundred dollars to steal it back fer me agin.”

“Dat’s plenty lib’ral,” Hopey said. “Mebbe ef you’ll hunt aroun’ you kin find somebody.”

Mustard quieted down and gave himself to deep meditation, trying to think of someone sufficiently bold to hold up Popsy and extract the treasure from his pocket.

Hopey took this opportunity to leave the room. She had heard a great deal from Mustard, and she did not care to be around when he began to mourn and lament again. She was a fat woman, and desired calm environments, and sought the ways of peace. Moreover, she did not attribute the same value to the rabbit-foot that Mustard did. It seemed to her that Gaitskill had given it to Mustard to keep for his own, and that he cared nothing for it, had forgotten all about it; he could not attach much importance to its possession when he had never made inquiry about it in all the time that Mustard had guarded it so zealously.

But Mustard was the best negro overseer in Louisiana for this reason as much as any other: he took care of things, regarded his employer’s property as more valuable even than his own, and everything belonging to Marse Tom was to be kept in order for the day when he should give an account of his stewardship.

After a while, Hopey thought of her friend, Dazzle Zenor. Dazzle had good sense, possessed the wisdom which comes from many varied experiences, and she would be able to help her now. She heard certain noises in the next room, which indicated that Mustard was getting ready to explode again, so she hastily left the house and went to town.

Dazzle lived in Ginny Babe Chew’s boardinghouse in Dirty-Six. So Hopey climbed pantingly to the second floor of this house and knocked on her door.

“Who’s dat?”

“Hopey Prophet is done come on bizzness. Open dis door!”

“Whut you come to see me fur?” Dazzle asked promptly, after she had admitted Hopey.

Dazzle was a woman who met all the exactions of Ethiopian beauty. Her skin as black as jet, her teeth like milk, her eyes so dark that they had a bluish tinge, slim and strong and graceful, an actress, a dancer, a singer, she was the dusky belle of Tickfall. Every negro man who had married anybody in the past four years had first proposed to and been rejected by Dazzle.

Many of Dazzle’s enterprises were highly adventurous, and she was always fearful and suspicious. So when Hopey hesitated to begin, Dazzle’s tone became sharp with anxiety:

“Whut you come to see me fur?” she repeated.

“I come to consult wid you about a little scrape our fambly is got into, Dazzle,” Hopey began. “Us is liable to hab plenty trouble onless somebody kin he’p us.”

“Whut’s done busted loose now?” Dazzle asked easily. Her mind was now at rest, for nothing that could happen to Hopey’s family could impinge on any of Dazzle’s previous escapades.

“Mustard is done loss his rabbit-foot!” Hopey exclaimed in tragic tones.

Dazzle laughed.

“I’ll gib Mustard a hatful of dem things. I’m got about twenty.”

“But dis here is a royal rabbit-foot,” Hopey said with emphasis.

“I never heerd of dat kind, but ’tain’t no ’count whutever it is,” Dazzle smiled. “I done tried all kinds, an’ I knows.”

“But dis rabbit-foot b’longed to Marse Tom Gaitskill,” Hopey informed her, “an’ Mustard lost it, an’ Marse Tom will kill Mustard ef he don’t git it back.”

“No doubts,” Dazzle chuckled. “White folks ain’t got no real good sense, an’ nobody cain’t tell whut dey will do.”

Then Dazzle listened while Hopey told the tale of the disappearance of the rabbit-foot. Dazzle was not much impressed with this story of another’s misfortune, but at the last one sentence stimulated her interest:

“Mustard says he will pay one hundred dollars to whoever gits his foot back.”

That was speaking in language which Dazzle could understand. She sprang to her feet.

“I’ll earn dat hundred dollars right now,” Dazzle proclaimed. “I’ll go out to Popsy’s cabin an’ pull his nose till he gibs up dat foot.”

“’Tain’t possible, Dazzle,” Hopey said. “We don’t want Marse Tom to know dat de foot is lost. Ef you go to pullin’ noses an’ skinnin’ shins, Popsy will beller, an’ Marse Tom will hear about dat.”

“He’d shore howl,” Dazzle agreed, reluctantly abandoning that plan. “Well, I’ll go out and make love to dat ole man, an’ sneak de rabbit-foot outen his pocket.”

“Any way will do dat will git de foot back ’thout makin’ too much of a rookus, Dazzle,” Hopey said. “We don’t want no row, no nigger scrape, no loud noise, and no white folks mixin’ in.”

“White folks is shore good mixers,” Dazzle said, wincing at the recollection of several plans of hers which had been rudely frustrated by the interference of the whites. “I’ll see whut I kin do.”

At the time that Hopey was in conversation with Dazzle Zenor, Mustard was in deep thought. At last a name came into his darkened and troubled mind which was like a blaze of light illuminating all his perplexities: “Skeeter Butts!”

Ten minutes later he entered the Hen-Scratch saloon and was told that the man he sought was in a little room in the rear.

“I’m shore glad to find you so easy, Skeeter,” Mustard said in a relieved tone. “Ef you had been out of town I would hab fotch’ my troubles to you jes’ the same, whar you wus.”

“Dis is whar you gits exputt advices on ev’ything,” Skeeter laughed as he sat down and lighted a cigarette.

Why is it that people make confidants of barkeeps?

And whom will we tell our troubles to when the world is made safe for prohibition?

Skeeter was a saddle-colored, dapper, petite negro, the dressiest man of any color who ever lived in Tickfall. His hair was always closely clipped, the part made in the middle of his head with a razor. His collars were so high that they made him look like a jackass, with his chin hanging over a whitewashed fence. His clothes were so loud that they invariably proclaimed the man a block away.

He was the “pet nigger” of all the well-to-do white people in the town, who invariably took him upon their hunting and fishing trips; his dancing, singing, gift of mimicry, and certain histrionic gifts had given him a place in many amateur theatrical exhibitions in Tickfall, among both whites and blacks; and with all his monkey trickery he, nevertheless, had the confidence of all the white people, and could walk in and out of more houses without a question being asked as to the reason for his presence there than any white or black in the little village.

Among the negroes he was Sir Oracle. He was matrimonial adjuster in courtship, marriage, and divorce; he was confidential adviser at baptisms and funerals; his expert advice was sought in all matters pertaining to lodge and church and social functions. In short, he represented in Tickfall colored society what Colonel Gaitskill did among the white people.

“Dis is whar you gits exputt advices on eve’ything,” Skeeter laughed, for he knew his standing among his people.

“I don’t want advices. I wants a hold-up man,” Mustard said gloomily.

“How come?”

“A feller stole somepin from me, an’ I wants somebody to steal it back,” Mustard explained.

“Bawl out wid it,” Skeeter snapped. “Don’t go beatin’ de bush aroun’ de debbil. Talk sense!”

Mustard hesitated for a long time, opened his mouth once or twice as if about to speak, shook his head, and seemed to think better of it.

“Well,” Skeeter snapped, “why don’t you tell it?”

“I don’t know how to begin,” Mustard sighed.

“Begin at de fust part an’ tell dat fust,” Skeeter ranted. “Is you been hittin’ Marse Tom’s bottle?”

Under this sort of prodding, continued for some time longer, Skeeter finally got Mustard started, and got the story. It is not necessary to repeat it, although Mustard’s way of telling what happened and what he thought of Popsy would be interesting.

“An’ now, Skeeter,” Mustard concluded, “de idear is dis: Popsy stole my rabbit-foot, an’ I want you to steal it back. Rob de ole man of my foot an’ fotch it back to me, an’ I’ll gib you one hundred dollars.”

“Pay in eggsvance?” Skeeter asked eagerly.

“No,” Mustard said.

“Bestow a little money in eggsvance to keep my mind int’rusted.”

“Suttinly. Ten dollars cash down—you got to pay it back ef you don’t do no good.”

“I’ll git de foot all right,” Skeeter said confidently.

“Don’t be too shore, Skeeter,” Mustard warned him. “You might git in jail, an’ ef you does, don’t ax me to he’p you.”

“You means to say ef I bust into ole Popsy’s cabin an’ steal de foot, an’ he gits me arrested, you won’t esplain nothin’ to de cote-house?”

“Nary a single esplain!” Mustard proclaimed solemnly. “Dat’s jes’ whut I means. I ain’t gwine git mixed up in dis no way an’ no how! Ef you gits in jail, I won’t open my mouth ef dey hangs you on a tree.”

Skeeter pulled out of his pocket the ten-dollar bill which Mustard had just given him and spread it out upon his knee, smoothing it with his yellow fingers.

“Gimme fo’ more ten-dollar bills to spread out on top of dis tenner,” Skeeter commanded.

Mustard promptly handed over the money.

“Dis here detecative stealin’ job is a risky bizzness,” Skeeter proclaimed. “I ain’t never got at nothin’ yit as dangersome.”

“I knows it, Skeeter,” Mustard agreed gloomily. “Ef you ain’t keerful, you’ll git a bullet in you; an’ ef dat sad misforchine happens to you I won’t even come to yo’ fun’ral. I ain’t gwine mix wid dis at all.”

Mustard arose, walked through the barroom, climbed upon his horse, and departed for the Nigger-Heel plantation.

Skeeter sat for a long time, considering all that Mustard had told him, the money still spread out upon his knee. Then he arose and pocketed the money, walked out to the rear, and sat down in a chair under his favorite china-berry tree.

Two boys up the street diverted his attention for a moment. They had a long, black bullwhip, and were taking turn-about trying to see who could “pop” it the loudest. The “cracker” on the whip was nearly worn off, and they decided to plait an entirely new cracker, one that would pop like a pistol. Neither had a pocket-knife, and they could find nothing with which to remove the old cracker. They tried to saw it off with a piece of sharp glass, abandoned that in favor of a piece of sharp-edged tin can, then took a sharp rock and tried to beat it off.

When they saw Skeeter Butts they swooped down on him.

“Lend us de loant of yo’ pocket-knife, Skeeter,” Little Bit asked.

Skeeter thrust his hand into his pocket, found nothing, and answered:

“I left it inside de barroom. I’m glad of it, because you’s be shore to cut yourselfs.”

Skeeter leaned his chair against the tree, sat down, and placed the heels of his shoes in the front rungs of the chair, tipped his hat down over his eyes until the bridge of his nose was invisible, and sat motionless. Except the tiny column of smoke that curled up from his cigarette, there was scarcely a sign of life.

The two boys wandered around to the front of the saloon. Then a bright idea came to Little Bit:

“Marse Org, less git a match an’ burn de cracker offen dis ole whup.”

“Where’s the match?”

Little Bit led him into the saloon and conducted him to the little room in the rear. There, upon a table, they found a box of matches, and Org struck one and applied it to the cracker, while Little Bit held the whip.

The cracker easily caught fire and burned freely. When it was near to the rawhide end of the lash Little Bit gave the whip a quick jerk and the flaming cracker flew off the end. The boys laughed at the success of their plan, picked up a handful of twine strings which lay around the floor, and walked out.

Boylike, they never looked to see where the flaming cracker went. They didn’t care where it went. They didn’t want it. They went out the way they had come, and ran up the street and far away.

Skeeter was undisturbed until Dazzle Zenor passed and roused him.

“I got a big job befo’ me,” she said.

“Me, too,” Skeeter replied.

“My job am a secret,” Dazzle offered.

“Mine, too,” Skeeter responded.

“I’s fixin’ to make a good bunch of money,” Dazzle boasted.

“I’ll either make money or git in jail,” Skeeter said. “I’m got a detecative job.”

“My job is harder,” Dazzle smiled. “I pick pockets.”

“I bet you is flirtin’ wid a jail, too,” Skeeter asserted.

“Mebbe so. I cain’t tell you no more——”

Suddenly she stopped and stared at the closed door in the rear of the saloon through which tiny spirals of smoke were issuing by way of the cracks.

“Is you fumigatin’, Skeeter?” she asked.

“Fumigatin’ whut?” Skeeter asked, then ran to the door and threw it open.

The room was filled with smoke and a pile of old trash and newspapers in one corner was ablaze.

With a loud whoop, Skeeter and Dazzle ran through the smoke to the fire; from the door which entered into the barroom, Figger Bush came in with a bucket of water, yelling like a wild man. It was all over in a minute.

“Good-by, Skeeter!” Dazzle laughed. “Mebbe us’ll meet in jail.”

“Dat fire is a bad sign for me, Dazzle,” Skeeter sighed. “Troubles is gittin’ ready to happen to me.”

“Things will shore happen whar a white boy an’ a pickaninny monkeys aroun’,” Dazzle told him.

When the inveterate smoker throws away a pipe, it may be safely presumed that the pipe has some potency. A briar-root sweetens with age, mellowing and ripening in its own nicotine, and then it becomes impossible. So it happened that Colonel Gaitskill was compelled to an act of abandonment. The pipe that had solaced him for years was hurled far over in a clump of weeds in the horse-pasture.

One pair of sharp eyes saw the act of abandonment and watched to see where the pipe fell. One pair of nimble feet carried their owner to the spot where the forsaken thing had fallen. A pair of eager hands laid hold upon it, and Orren Randolph Gaitskill found himself in proud possession of a real pipe.

If Orren’s Sunday-school teacher had arrived at that particular moment and had been disposed to instruct this youth upon the injurious effects of nicotine, he could have run a broom-straw down the stem of that pipe and brought it out all black and shiny with poison. Finding a cat who never had smoked, did not even “chaw,” he could have forced that straw between pussy’s teeth, drawing it lengthwise through the sides of her mouth, thus wiping off the nicotine upon her tongue. He could then have waited a few minutes and had a free show for himself and Orren Randolph Gaitskill: the exhibition of a suffering cat, dying miserably in a fit.

But, no! Orren had not the remotest idea of permitting a cat, or even a Sunday-school teacher, to share the delights of that pipe with him. He intended to smoke it in exclusive partnership with his colored friend, Little Bit.

Orren found Little Bit sitting on a curb-stone in front of the Hen-Scratch saloon, and exhibited the treasure.

“Dat’s a purty good pipe, but whar’s yo’ terbacker?” Little Bit asked.

“You ought to furnish that,” Org replied. “I’ve got the pipe and the matches.”

“I ain’t got none.”

“Don’t yo’ mammy smoke?”

“Naw. She dips.”

“Don’t your father smoke?”

“Ain’t got no paw. He’s daid.”

“Well, then: can’t you borrow a little tobacco from some of your friends?”

“Ain’t got no frien’s, excusin’ you.”

“What about Skeeter Butts?”

“He ain’t no frien’ of our’n. He’s mad at us because we sot his saloom on fire wid dat hot whup-cracker.”

“I never saw a colored person with as little as you have,” Orren said irascibly. “You haven’t got nothin’.”

“Dat’s a fack. Dat’s de nachel way niggers is. But I knows whar dar is plenty rabbit terbacker.”

“That’s as good as any, I’m sure,” Org said. “Lead me to it.”

A short distance on the edge of the town, Little Bit led Org into a wide pasture, along the edge of which there ran a little branch. He hunted a few minutes in search of a plant which is known in other places as “life everlasting,” but in Louisiana is called “rabbit tobacco.”

This can be said for it: the oldest pipe-user, dying for want of a smoke, will not smoke the weed called life everlasting. He lets rabbit tobacco alone. It has the flavor and the odor of tobacco. It also has an effect, when used, which invariably reminds every man of the time when he smoked his first cigar.

“Dar she is!” Little Bit exclaimed, pouncing upon a dry weed. “Dis here plant will gib us aplenty.”

He stripped off the dry leaves, crushed them in his hands and, assisted by Org, he packed the pipe-bowl. They walked to the edge of a little thicket and sat down upon a convenient log to enjoy their smoke. A long, level pasture stretched out before them, dotted here and there with grazing cattle, ending across the way with a rail fence, beside which grew a row of trees.

Org produced a box of matches, laid it upon the ground beside him, and reached out for the pipe.

“I’ll light up and smoke awhile, Little Bit. Then I’ll pass it to you.”

“Hit away, Marse Org. I ain’t really hankerin’ fer no pipe-smoke. I likes cigareets best. But I’ll go it a puff or two, ef you’ll puff fust.”

Org lighted the pipe and was charmed at the ease with which he could draw the smoke through the stem. The smoke was exceptionally sweet and cooling to the tongue, like the flavor of ether, although Org had never tasted that volatile fluid. He took four or five hearty puffs, and then felt that it was time to introduce his black friend to this charming and delightful accomplishment.

Little Bit had counted the number of times that Org had blown the smoke from his lips and he had too much regard for his “raisin’” to puff a single time more than his white companion. After four draws he handed back the pipe.

Org reached for it with a disinterested hand. He held the pipe listlessly and gazed out dreamily upon the level meadow with eyes which saw little and comprehended less and were not interested in that. Then the pipe dropped from his hands, and Org opened his eyes wide, as he suddenly beheld the entire pasture with all its grazing cattle, the fence with the trees at the far end—everything, in fact, rise up in the air and dance high above his head!

Org leaned back so far to behold the last of this phenomenon that he fell off the log and lay prone upon the ground.

“Whut ails you, Marse Org?” Little Bit asked solicitously. “Is de worl’ done turned down-side up fer you, too?”

Little Bit arose with the intention of helping his white companion, the entire earth tipped and rolled over on him and pushed him over the log, where he lay holding to the ground to keep from being pitched off.

One hour later the two boys crawled up on the log and sat down, trembling, weak, beyond any weakness they had ever experienced.

“I guess we got poisoned with something, Little Bit,” Org remarked. “I feel pretty bad.”

“Dar ain’t been many cullud folks as sick as I wus an’ lived through it,” Little Bit replied with weak boastfulness. “Niggers is like a mule: dey don’t git sick but one time an’ atter dat, dey die. I wus wuss off in de last hour dan I ever is been. It muss hab been somepin I et.”

“I been heap sicker than you were,” Org declared. “You lived through it—you say so yourself. But me, I’m dying now!”

“Dis ain’t no fitten place to die, Marse Org,” Little Bit protested. “De buzzards will eat us up out here all unbeknownst to nobody. Less mosey back to town whar people kin see us die an’ keep de buzzards off.”

“Less hurry. I ain’t got long to live,” Org declared.

“We moves now,” Little Bit sighed miserably. “Dis wus shore a narrer escapement fer us.”

Locomotion was a difficult task for both of them. They were glad when they came to the fence and could use a stick with one hand and cling to the fence with the other. When they reached the road, they made wild and desperate gestures and stopped a little automobile.

“Whar you fellers been at?” Skeeter Butts asked as he opened the door for them to climb in beside him. “You look all peeked up.”

“Me an’ Marse Org, we been smokin’ rabbit terbacker,” Little Bit told him.

“Ho! Ho! He! He!” Skeeter Butts howled. “I done dat trick once myself. You-alls gwine try it agin?”

“Naw, suh.”

“I reckin not,” Skeeter laughed. “I tried smokin’ dat stuff twenty year ago an’ right now whenever I sees a bush of dat rabbit terbacker, I grabs a tree an’ begins to heave!”

Skeeter turned his machine and started back to Tickfall.

“Whar you want me to take you?” he asked.

“Home, quick!” Org sighed.

“Drap me at de Hen-Scratch,” Little Bit begged. “I ain’t got de cornstitution to ride no furder.”

Skeeter drove to Gaitskill’s home, lifted Org out of the machine and carried him to the porch. Org promptly stretched out flat on his back on the porch floor and called:

“Gince! Oh, Gince! Come here and help me! I’m dying!”

Coming in answer to his call, Miss Virginia’s face at first assumed an expression of fright at the sight of Org, then, glancing at Skeeter’s grinning mug, her uneasiness vanished.

“What have you been doing?” she asked Org.

“Smoking,” Org confessed. “Smoking a pipe!”

“Where is that pipe?”

Org thrust a trembling hand into the pocket of his coat and produced the briar-root.

“The idea!” Miss Virginia snapped, looking at the pipe with loathsome repugnance. “What else have you in your pockets? Let me see!”

Org turned the pockets of his trousers wrong side out and a number of strange and nameless things rolled out, things which could have value only in the eyes of a boy.

“Turn out your coat pockets!” Virginia commanded.

Org thrust his hand into his coat and handed Virginia a green-plush box.

The eyes of Skeeter Butts nearly popped out of his head.

“For goodness’ sake!” Virginia exclaimed in an angry voice as she seized the box.

“I was carrying it for luck, Gince,” Org said apologetically. “Little Bit said it was lucky, but—oh, I feel so sick!”

Virginia opened the box and brought forth a rabbit-foot surmounted on one end with silver. Finding that it had not been injured, she spoke in a mollified tone:

“After this, you understand that this plush box is mine, young man! Don’t you ever touch it again!”

“I won’t. It ain’t no good.”

“Skeeter,” she said. “Carry Org up-stairs to my room. I’ll lead the way.”

Skeeter lifted the prostrate boy and carried him where his sister led. He lingered around the bed where he had placed Org until he saw Miss Virginia open the drawer of a dressing-table and place the green-plush box within it and shut the drawer.

“You wants me to git de dorctor, Miss Virginny?” Skeeter asked.

“No. That will be all for you, thank you.”

When Skeeter stepped out upon the road beside the house, he noticed Colonel Gaitskill out in the horse-pasture, walking around in a circle defined by a clump of grass, his eyes glued upon the ground as if he was hunting for something.

“Have you done loss somepin, Marse Tom?” Skeeter inquired as he walked to where he was.

“Yes. I had a pipe that I have smoked for twenty years. I threw it out in these weeds this morning and bought a new pipe. But the new pipe is an abomination. I’m looking for the old one.”

“I think young Marse Org is got dat ole one,” Skeeter laughed. “Miss Virginny jes’ now tuck it offen him an’ lef’ it on de front porch.”

Gaitskill stooped and broke off the stem of a weed. He stripped the leaves from the straight stem, crushed them, and sniffed at the peculiar, sweetish, tobacco odor.

Skeeter caught the scent, reeled backward, clutched at his throat, grabbed a convenient tree and began to heave!

XI

AT AUCTION

When Skeeter Butts informed Mustard Prophet that his coveted rabbit-foot was in the Gaitskill home, Mustard nearly went into hysterics.

“My Gawd!” he wailed. “No tellin’ whut dem white chillun will do to dat foot—an’ mebbe I won’t never see it agin.”

“Dey ain’t gwine hurt it—Marse Tom’s house is safer dan a bank!” Skeeter protested.

“How’ll I ever git dat foot back outen dat house?” Mustard howled. “Of co’se de house is safer dan a bank. Us cain’t rob a white folk’s house.”

“How come you want it back ef it b’longs to Marse Tom?” Skeeter asked.

“It’s dis way, Skeeter,” Mustard said, trying to explain. “Eve’ything dat Marse Tom trusts to me, I keeps jes’ like it is when he gibs it to me. Ef he hands me a door-key, he needn’t ax me fer dat key fer ten year, but when he do, I’ll gib him dat key! Now, he gimme dat foot fifteen year ago, an’ he ain’t never mentioned dat foot since dat time nor seed it endurin’ all dem years; but ef he wuster come to de Nigger-Heel to-morrer an’ ax me, ‘Mustard, whar’s my rabbit-foot?’ my insides would bust open an’ be outsides onless I could say: ‘Here she am!’”

“I sees,” Skeeter Butts said. “You’s got a rep wid Marse Tom.”

“Dat’s right. I’s tryin’ not to ruin my rep.”

“I wish I’d ’a’ knowed dat little white boy had dat foot in his pocket,” Skeeter sighed. “I’d ’a’ picked his pocket or heldt him up or somepin’ like dat.”

“Too late fer dat now,” Mustard mourned. “Dat white boy found dat rabbit-foot down at ole Popsy’s cabin. Popsy lives back on de Gaitskill place in a cabin Marse Tom gib him, an’ dem pickaninnies wus playin’ aroun’ dar an’ swiped it. An’ ef Marse Tom ever ketches on dat I wus so keerless wid his royal foot dat I let a bat like ole Popsy git holt of it an’ run away wid it, an’ den let it git in de hands of dem chillun—Oh, Lawdy!”

Tears ran down the cheeks of Mustard Prophet. The loss of the luck-charm was a real tragedy to Mustard, for his life had been one of absolute fidelity in little things.

Every Southern man knows that the most unaccountable paradox in negro nature and character lies right here: you may choose the trickiest negro thief in Louisiana, give him the key to your money-chest, go to Europe and stay ten years, and when you return the negro will hand you the key, and the contents of the chest will be intact. Doubtless, he will open the chest a hundred times and investigate everything within it, but he will not betray his trust. Then, having surrendered the key and given an account of his stewardship, as he goes through the hall on the way out, he might pick up your gold-headed cane, stick it down his pants’ leg and hike!

But Mustard had always kept his record straight in all respects. He was faithful in that which was much and in that which was least. And now that his rabbit-foot had got in Gaitskill’s home, he found it impossible to stay away from that house. He must get it back before Gaitskill discovered it there and asked questions. He dared not tell Hopey where it had been located, for Hopey had an openwork mind and a garrulous mouth, and she might let something drop that would reveal the secret.

Mustard devoted his days to service on the Nigger-Heel plantation and came to town every night. He had to ride fourteen miles to make the round trip every twenty-four hours, but he felt easier if he could only be near the house where his rabbit-foot was concealed.

It was summer time, growing time, with the cotton “laid by.” Not much work to be done on the plantation and a great many days as well as nights could be spent in town. His presence around the Gaitskill house attracted no comment, for Mustard and his fat spouse had been associated with the Gaitskill family since the day they were born. They were as much of the place as the trees that grew on the lawn and their presence was no more unusual.

Mustard, in the rÔle of Hopey’s helper, contrived to run a great many errands up and down the back stairs of the Gaitskill house, trying with each trip to get closer to his luck-charm, at least close enough to see it and to know that it was still there and safe. But he could never muster quite enough courage to enter Miss Virginia Gaitskill’s private room.

Saturday afternoon came, the afternoon when every negro in Louisiana who can acquire a little money to spend when he gets to town, puts on his best clothes and leaves the plantation.

Each village fills up with colored folks. Each darkey has his own idea of what constitutes fine dress and on this parade he sees no reason for wearing something showy without being able to show it. If he wears a red undershirt he keeps his overshirt unbuttoned so the showy thing will show. If he wears a pair of red socks, he keeps his trousers rolled up nearly to his knees, and sometimes one can see a hundred negroes who look like they are fixed for wading. If he possesses a colored handkerchief, be sure to look for it in the upper pocket of his coat, one corner sticking out!

If he has anything to sell, he brings it to town. Stock is auctioned upon the street, horses are swapped, lies are exchanged, knives, pistols, “gamblin’-hands,” conjures, and luck charms, all exchange owners.

Mustard mingled with this crowd in gloomy preoccupation. His mind and his heart were centered upon a green-plush box in the top dresser-draw of a young lady’s boudoir—as inaccessible, so it seemed to him, as the moon!

A number of men converged, forming a laughing crowd in front of the court-house, and listened to the raucous voice of an auctioneer:

“Old Jinx” was for sale by auction.

“Gentlemen, this here is a mule that is known to everybody in this parish. He’s got the legs on him and he’s got the bones on him, and he’s got a good, sound mind in a good, sound body, both ripened by long years of toil and experience. Some of you remember when Jinx first came to Tickfall Parish, but none of you can remember how old Jinx is now and how old he was when you first saw him. You can estimate the age of a cow by the rings on her horns and the age of a tree by the concentric rings on its trunk, and the age of a horse or mule by the teeth. But Jinx is an exception to all rules. He’s a mystery. He has no pride of ancestry, no hope of posterity, and his future is behind him. How much am I bid for Jinx?”

There were guffaws of laughter and sly jokes passed among the men, but there were no bidders.

“Don’t be afraid of Jinx, gentlemen!” the auctioneer pleaded. “He’s done a lot of work in his time and he’s got a lot more work in his system if anybody can get it out. He’s perfectly harmless, a woman or a child can drive him or ride him or work him in the field. He’s as deaf as a post, so you can cuss him in any known language without causing offense to the cussee. He’s nearly a hundred years old, I reckon, but his age ain’t nothing against him. I knew a man who was one hundred years old and he married a woman who was ninety years old and they had a little baby that was born with a pair of spectacles on his nose and a full set of teeth. How much am I bid for Jinx?”

“Five dollars!” some wag shouted.

“Five! Five! Five! I’m bid five!” the auctioneer began with a monotonous, bark-like chant. “Five dollars, I’m bid, only five! Somebody make it six, make it six, make it six! Six dollars—somebody bid six, as a token of love and esteem for old Jinx—the only mule which has survived the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the recent Mexican War, and the mule behind that dragged the guns in the great world war.

“Veteran and survivor of four great wars, and yet this mule never smelt powder or heard a cap pop! This mule with all his rich and varied experiences, is like a feller who spends a dollar riding on a merry-go-round. He spends all his money, gets off at the same place he got on, and where’s he been at? Nothing but a round trip for Jinx! To my positive knowledge, I’ve auctioned him off in front of this court-house twenty-two times in the past twenty-two years! Am I bid six?”

“Six!”

Then began the monotonous pleading and chanting of the auctioneer, his singsong appeal for seven dollars, interspersed with feeble jokes about Jinx.

As he stood leaning against a tree in listless inattention, Mustard Prophet saw Miss Virginia Gaitskill pass in an automobile with Captain Kerley Kerlerac. Ten minutes later he saw Mrs. Gaitskill enter the Tickfall bank, of which Colonel Gaitskill was president. Casting his eyes about him, he beheld Orren Randolph Gaitskill playing with Little Bit on a plot of grass beside the court-house. Then Mustard woke up!

“Dis here is my Gawd-given chance to git my rabbit-foot,” was the idea which exploded in his brain, and he started for the Gaitskill home with all the speed in his body.

Attracted by the crowd, Org and Little Bit became interested witnesses curious to know who would finally acquire old Jinx. This was the first auction Org had ever seen, and without an idea of the financial obligations involved in the transaction, he began to help the matter along.

When it seemed that Jinx was going to be knocked down to somebody, Org, at the solicitation of the auctioneer, bid eight!

“Eight dollars, eight, eight, eight!” the auctioneer whooped, seizing the bid like a woodpecker swoops upon a ripe June-bug. “Who’ll make it nine?”

It was a hot day. The perspiration streamed down the face of the auctioneer and the old mule stood with bowed head, panting for breath, utterly oblivious to the crowd around him. The auctioneer draped one arm over Jinx’s protruding hip-bone, hanging there for support, while he chanted:

“Nine, nine, nine—somebody make it nine!”

“Why don’t you do what that gentleman asks you?” Org inquired of Little Bit. “He asks you to make it nine—why don’t you do it?”

“Nine dollars!” Little Bit exclaimed in a frightened tone.

“Ten!” Orren Randolph Gaitskill called.

“Ten, I’m bid; ten, I’m bid—somebody’s either drunk or crazy, by jacks! Ten, I’m bid—who’ll play damphool and make it ’leven?”

“’Leben!” Little Bit chimed.

The auctioneer jerked off his big wool hat, slapped it against the bony side of the mule till it popped like a pistol and howled:

“Wake up, Jinx! You old varmint—you are surrounded by friends! Wake up and show your manners!”

The mule raised his head, shut one eye with an absurdly sleepy wink, dropped one big leathery ear forward, and let his head sag down until his nose almost touched his knee.

“Twelve dollars!”

This was more than the auctioneer could endure. He must ascertain the source of these rival bids. A shout of laughter rose from the crowd of men which shook the windows in the stores, as the auctioneer stooped and looked between the men and his red-rimmed eyes rested upon two boys, one white, one black!

“Who bid that twelve dollars?” he snapped, glaring at the boys.

“Me,” Org confessed.

“You want to buy this old mule?”

“Er—yes, sir.”

“Have you got twelve dollars to pay for it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where’s that money—show it to me!”

“It’s up in Gince’s room,” Org said without explaining who Gince was. “I’ll have to go after it.”

“Go! Hurry!” the auctioneer snapped, wiping the perspiration from his face. “What sort of business man are you, leaving your pocketbook lying around? Here, you, Little Bit! Hold old Jinx till this boy comes back!”

Mustard lost no time in getting to Gaitskill’s home, but the resolution which had given speed to his feet oozed away when he arrived, and left him a timorous negro, hesitant, ignorant of how to proceed further to secure the object he had come after. Mustard had no practical experience in this sort of work to guide him now. He realized dimly that it was not becoming that the trusted overseer of a great plantation should sneak into his employer’s home and take something from it, even though the thing he took really belonged to him. But he knew that this was the only way he could get the luck-charm without letting Marse Tom know.

He reconnoitered and assured himself that no one was in the house. He walked through the kitchen, entered the back hall, and climbed cautiously up the back steps. Walking quietly, he went through the upper hall toward the front and stood at last looking into the dainty, exquisite room of the girl in the home.

It took him a long time to muster the courage to go in. It was a pretty room, with ferns and photographs and flowered cretonne, an old rosewood bed of exquisite beauty of design, beside it a small electric lamp with a rose-colored shade. Two windows, shaded by loosely hanging rose-colored silk, a rosewood writing-desk. Mustard saw all this unconsciously. His eyes were set upon the rosewood dressing-table against the wall between the two windows. On the table lay a gold mesh purse; beside the purse were three rings, whose gems could have bought Mustard a barrel full of rabbit-feet!

Of all the treasures in that room, Mustard wanted the least valuable, measured by pecuniary standards. If he had been dying of starvation, he would not have stepped within that room to lay a thievish hand upon a single object. But he had to have that rabbit-foot!

One step at a time, moving with fear and trembling, he started toward the dressing-table. Frightened, he backed out into the hall again; venturing once more, he got almost to the table, then backed again. He stepped to the far end of the hall and looked anxiously down the back steps, fearful that someone might have entered the kitchen. Then he returned to the room, ventured, backed out, moved forward, moved sidewise, hesitated, side-stepped, moved forward slowly and at last laid his black, square-shaped, labor-hardened hand upon the beautiful white scarf upon the dresser!

One of Orren Randolph Gaitskill’s favorite games was to play “Indian.” This consisted in sneaking about the house in absolute silence, dodging behind the doors, crawling under the beds and couches and tables if he heard anyone approaching and when a suitable opportunity presented itself, he would jump out upon some member of the household with a blood-curdling yell!

Org was playing Indian now for a purpose. He was by no means sure that his sister would approve his purchasing a mule for twelve dollars even with his own money, and he planned to slip up to her room and get his money out of his own purse in her dressing-table drawer without her knowledge.

He noiselessly opened the front door and entered the reception room. As he sneaked up the steps, his eyes came level with the floor of the hallway above, he saw Mustard Prophet, backing and filling, giving a ridiculous illustration of a steamboat trying to make a difficult landing.

Great is the imagination of boyhood!

Org caught this thing in an instant: Here he was, a wild and savage Indian slipping up upon a steamboat of pioneers while the boat was trying to land upon the banks of the mighty Mississippi. Mustard Prophet, backing and filling, moving up and moving back, was the steamboat!

Mustard’s negro wife went into Miss Virginia’s room every day to straighten up. Mustard helped Hopey around the house all the time. The fact that Mustard was in the house, or even in his sister’s room, made no difference to the boy. That part of it was all right.

Orren was determined that Mustard should not see him. He lay down flat upon the stair-steps and crawled with the greatest caution toward the top.

Just as the steamboat navigated the dangerous waters of Miss Gaitskill’s room and threw out a line on the dressing-table, the Indian peeped around the door-jamb!

It is better to abandon the rhetorical and imaginative now; it is too easy to forget which is who, and get the Indian and the steamboat mixed.

What Org saw as he peeped around the door was Mustard Prophet, his nervous black hand resting upon the dressing-table. Slowly Org raised himself to his feet and took a big breath and jumped.

There was a loud whoop, which Org imagined was the equivalent to a blood-curdling yell!

It curdled Mustard Prophet, all right!

The negro was absolutely petrified! He stood like a statue carved of ebony, apparently nothing alive about him except the eyes, which got bigger and burned with fires of terror. Fright sometimes paralyzes temporarily; nothing moves, even the mind stands still. The victim helpless, disaster swoops down like an eagle upon its prey.

Orren was disappointed.

“Why didn’t you jump when I hollered?” he exclaimed in an aggrieved tone. “I’m playing Indian.”

Orren was completely blind to the negro’s pitiful fright. It was fully a minute before Mustard could utter a word. The vital forces had ceased, and they started slowly as when a street-car grips the vital force of the cable and gets going.

“Dat yell wus so disturbin’ dat I felt—er—sorter disturbed, Marse Org,” he sighed weakly, walking toward the hall and resting his hand upon the door-jamb. “I wus plum’ putrified wid bein’ so skeart!”

“You don’t act like it,” Org snorted. “The next time I yell like that, you jump!”

“I will, Marse Org, I shore will!” Mustard promised him fervently. “I got to hurry down to de kitchen now. Goo-good-by!”

Org jerked open the drawer of the dressing-table, flirted a green-plush box which contained a rabbit-foot out of his way, picked up his own little purse and extracted twelve dollars.

Slamming the drawer shut, he went racing back to the court-house to pay for his mule.

XIII

THE HIRELINGS

When Org stopped in front of the court-house and placed the twelve dollars in the auctioneer’s sweating, dirt-begrimed palm, that functionary bellowed:

“Twelve, I’m bid, once! Twelve, I’m bid, twice! Twelve, I’m bid, three times, and sold! Sold to this boy for twelve dollars! Go git your mule, son!”

The auctioneer sought a convenient place to quench a consuming thirst. Old Jinx stood in the middle of the street, his eyes closed, his big, loose ears hanging down like a couple of banana-leaves that had broken and were flapping down around the stalk of the plant. Org caught hold of one big ear and spoke down into its fuzzy, dusty depth, exactly as a man speaks into the mouth-piece of a telephone:

“Hello, hello! Wake up!”

Little Bit placed the end of a small leading-rope into Org’s hands and announced:

“You done bought a mule, Marse Org. Whut you gwine do wid him?”

“What?” Org asked.

“You cain’t leave dis here mule standin’ still an’ blockin’ up de street,” Little Bit explained. “Dey’ll arrest dis mule an’ put him in de holdover like dey does all de stray cows, an’ it’ll cost you five dollars to git him out.”

“I haven’t got any five dollars,” Org announced. “That man took all the money I had.”

“I reckin we better lead him somewheres,” Little Bit laughed.

“Help me up on him,” Org commanded. “I want to ride him now.”

“You ain’t got no bridle,” Little Bit demurred. “Dat mule ain’t know whar you want him to go ’thout no bridle onless you kin gee-haw him, an’ you ain’t know nothin’ about ploughin’. An’ he’ll shore take you back whar he came from ef you ain’t guide him somewhar else.”

“I guess we better go ahead of him and show him the way,” Org proposed. Then gazing at the closed eyes, he said: “I guess we better take him home and let him take a nap; he looks awful sleepy to me.”

“He’s like a nigger,” Little Bit snickered. “A mule an’ a nigger kin sleep standin’ up an’ walkin’!”

At the foot of the hill near the Gaitskill home, Jinx uttered a loud groan and sank down upon his side, slapping the earth with a jolt that shook the ground under their feet.

“Dar now, he shore come down wid a looseness like he’s fixin’ to die,” Little Bit exclaimed. “Ef he dies here in dis town, it’ll cost you fo’ dollars to hab him hauled away.”

“I haven’t got four dollars,” Org replied, and then ran down the street, waving his arms at an automobile.

The machine stopped and Dr. Moseley leaned out and listened:

“Doctor, I know you ain’t a mule physician, but I just bought a big mule and he’s took sick and if he dies it’ll cost a lot of money to have him hauled off. I ain’t got the money to have him hauled away, and so you must come and keep him from dying.”

“Got any money to pay my doctor’s bill?” the physician asked.

“No, sir.”

“Got any money to pay for medicine to cure your mule?”

“No, sir.”

“Charity patient, by jacks!” the physician grinned.

“No, sir,” Org protested. “Me and my mule will pay. Whenever your automobile breaks down, I’ll let you ride my mule!”

No offer could be fairer, so Org swung up on the foot-board and rode with the obliging physician to the sick-bed of the mule. That able physician had once been all-boy himself, and he understood.

“Bless my soul, if it ain’t Jinx!” he laughed as he drew near the prostrate animal. After a moment’s examination he added: “That mule is hungry, boys. Feed him! Feed him quick! Feed him high! Repeat the dose three times a day before each meal!”

Laughing, he turned his automobile and went off.

Two hours passed while the boys were getting feed and watching Jinx eat. They did not mind waiting. They sat on the curb in great contentment, discussing their purchase and planning for the future. Several men and women passed and stopped to chat with the boys, attracted by the novelty of a mule lying on the side of a road attended by two small boys. Without exception they recognized Jinx, for that mule was an established institution in Tickfall.

When Jinx got up the hill to the Gaitskill home he appeared very familiar with the place. In fact, he had been one of the Gaitskill mules several times in his varied career, and had found few other places where he had been as well treated.

“I guess we better let him stay in the front yard to-night, Little Bit,” Org said as he opened the gate and turned the animal in upon the Gaitskill lawn. “He’s too feeble to walk back as far as the stable, and I haven’t got any more time to fool with this mule. All our family are going to eat at Captain Kerley Kerlerac’s home to-night.”

The boys walked back together, separating at the court-house, and Little Bit went to the Hen-Scratch saloon.

He found Skeeter Butts in charge—told the story of Jinx, incidentally remarking that the whole Gaitskill family had gone to Kerlerac’s to eat dinner with his “boss.”

This last information pleased Skeeter Butts very much. He went out in the rear of the saloon to be by himself and think it over.

“Dat rabbit-foot is as good as got back already. I knows all about Marse Tom’s house. I done wucked in dat house so much dat I could walk eve’ywhar in it wid my eyes shut.”

About that time Hopey Prophet informed Dazzle Zenor of the absence of the Gaitskill family that evening. She knew the house, knew the people, and while she had not quite the liberty of an old family retainer, she fixed her plans to take this opportunity to raid the house.

“I’ll git dat foot certain,” she answered.

Skeeter waited impatiently until nine o’clock, then lighted a cigarette and sauntered out of the saloon. Under ordinary circumstances he would have entered the Gaitskill house from the rear. But, knowing that no one was at home, he came to the front porch and entered the front door. Once inside the house, he became extremely cautious. No use making a noise, even if there was no one to hear except himself.

It was very dark in the reception room, and while Skeeter was familiar with the house, and was sure that he was alone in it, he did not care to disarrange any furniture, and still less did he wish to fall over something and break it. He crept silently up the stairs and paused within a few feet of the room he intended to enter.

He heard a sound. Listening for a moment, he decided that someone was moving in the house, and that he had better not try to secure the rabbit-foot that night. His close-clipped hair stood up on his head like pig bristles as he began to retreat, and he lost no time in beating his way back to the hall below. He started to open the front door and escape that way, but on the second thought he decided it would be safer to go out through the kitchen.

As he passed into the back hall he heard some one coming down the steps of the back stairs. He crouched in a corner, waiting for the person to descend. Whoever it was, passed within a few feet of him, crossed the kitchen, and went out of the door. Skeeter noiselessly followed.

Once safely outside the house a senseless panic struck him, and he shot around the corner toward the front at full speed. On the walk in front of the house he collided with a terrible force with something, the impact jarring every bone in his body, and for a moment knocking him breathless, senseless. The second party in the collision, with a whistling expiration of breath sank limply against Skeeter Butts. He thrust out his arms and embraced a woman!

Skeeter was fond of the lady folks, and was usually chivalrous. But on this occasion he “dropped” the lady right there; cut her dead, so to speak. And started across the lawn at a speed never before attained by his pedal extremities.

Skeeter traveled crawfish fashion; he went forward, but he looked back. He turned to see where he was going, and there suddenly loomed before him a big, black object which looked to him as large as a house.

It was Jinx, lying on the ground.

Skeeter hit the front end of Jinx first and fell sprawlingly forward, and his arms and legs, outspread, were spraddled across Jinx’s bony back. The startled mule, aroused from his slumber, bellowed like a cow and began to get up, rising in bony sections, like a folding ladder.

For a moment Skeeter hung on to a few protruding bones, then he emitted a little whimpering sigh, slided off the bony sides of the ever-rising mountain, and lay flat upon the ground. The second collision had knocked him out.

Skeeter did not lose consciousness. He just lost breath. It was a long time before he rallied sufficiently to sit up, and when he did he heard a woman weeping softly.

“Who is dat onwindin’ dat bawl?” Skeeter inquired softly.

“Dis here is me,” the woman answered, which was enough for Skeeter, for he knew that voice.

“Whut wus you doin’ in dat house, Dazzle?” Skeeter asked, when he found her in the dark, sitting on the bottom step of the porch.

“I wus tryin’ to git dat rabbit-foot,” she said simply.

“How come you know about dat foot?”

“Hopey tole me. I wants de money Mustard is put up to git it back.”

“I wants dem dollars, too,” Skeeter laughed. “Less go in togedder an’ ’vide up de money even-Stephen.”

“I takes you on,” Dazzle said, finding comfort in her grief.

“Not no more to-night,” Skeeter said. “Dar’s a mule runnin’ loose in dis yard as big as a battleship. I butted him like a torpedo.”

“Whut happened?” Dazzle asked.

“I wus Jinxed,” Skeeter said simply. “Less go home.”

XIV

THE ALLIGATOR

Jinx became the greatest plaything that Org and Little Bit possessed. He could not fatten, but under the care and treatment he received he acquired a little more interest in life, and showed quite a fondness for his youthful owner.

Gaitskill laughed, and decided that the mule would keep Org out of mischief, which would justify the cost of its keep. Tickfall smiled at the sight of a little boy sitting on a big saddle while a diminutive black boy sat behind him, proud of his position and waving a greeting to all his black friends as he passed. Org and Little Bit would not have swapped Jinx for an automobile.

“A automobile gits out of fix,” Little Bit said as they discussed this one day. “When she stops nothin’ kin make her go. Ef somepin gits de matter wid it, nobody knows whut ails her.”

“But this mule is different,” Org said proudly. “I like something that wags its tail.”

“Dis hay-burner suits me,” Little Bit agreed.

They found to their delight that Jinx was thoroughly familiar with that great jungle called the Little Moccasin Swamp. The boys could ride out to that swamp upon Jinx and turn into any path which led into the jungle. The mule would carry them for miles along the winding animal trails, and then to their surprise they would find themselves in the highway again. They explored recesses in that swamp which they could never have reached without the mule, and they were never uneasy about losing their way.

They found great pools of water where large fish swam that were easily visible to the eye, and apparently unafraid. They found great sinks of vegetation where ugly snakes crawled, and they learned that Jinx could smell a snake as far as the eye could see, and that he had no desire to get near enough to be bitten. They saw immense turtles sunning themselves upon the logs and stumps. They found droves of wild pigs, extremely dangerous to man when he was standing upon his two feet, but harmless when a four-footed animal carried them upon his back.

Hence arose this matter of debate between them: Can a wild hog count? If he cannot, how does he know the difference between two legs and four legs?

They found an eagle’s nest, came too near, and were followed for miles by a screaming bird which swooped down upon them, fanned her immense wings within an inch of their hats, and snapped her vicious beak in their faces with a noise like the snip of immense shears. Once they saw a panther crouched upon a live-oak limb, his eyes glowing in the jungle shadows like living rubies; the animal screamed at them—the only thing which ever extracted a burst of speed from Jinx. They were followed for miles as they went out of that swamp by that screaming, snarling, hissing, spitting cat.

Once Little Bit turned around and made a noise like an exploding pop-bottle, a method which he had found efficacious in frightening domestic cats away. The vocal answer to Little Bit’s elocutionary effort was so terrifying that Jinx nearly jumped out of his skin.

Then one day, on the edge of a little clearing, they found a six-foot alligator asleep in the sun.

They dismounted and walked closer. The alligator slept on.

“How close can we get to this thing before he wakes up, Little Bit?” Org asked.

“He’s awake right now,” Little Bit told him. “He pretends like he’s so sleepy he’s mighty nigh dead, but he knows we is here all right. But he won’t move till you gits right on him, close enough to tech him wid yo’ hand.”

“What’ll he do then?” Org wanted to know.

“He’ll slap his tail aroun’ and knock yo’ foots out from under you an’ bite yo’ leg plum’ off,” Little Bit informed him. “He’s layin’ dar now waitin’ fer a wild pig to come rootin’ aroun’ him like wild pigs does aroun’ logs. Den he’ll slap ’em wid his tail an’ bite ’em in two.”

The boys backed away, climbed upon the trunk of a fallen tree, and looked across the underbrush at the alligator. He was as still as an old rusty stove-pipe, which he somewhat resembled.

“Less take that rope off our saddle and rope him,” Org suggested. “They rope everything in California, cattle and everything.”

“Who’s gwine put dat rope aroun’ dat alligator?” Little Bit asked.

“You can do that,” Org replied as he untied the rope from the saddle.

“Mebbe I kin, but I ain’t gwine to,” Little Bit asserted, climbing up on the back of the mule. “Little Bit don’t choose but a little bit of alligator in his’n. Dis mule don’t hanker fer none.”

“All right, ’fraid-cat,” Org taunted. “You hold the mule, and I’ll throw the rope.”

Like most boys who had lived in the West, Org had often played with a rope, looping it and throwing it in imitation of the cowmen. He climbed upon a trunk of a fallen tree about thirty feet from the quiescent alligator, coiled the rope, and threw it with wonderful luck. The coil straightened, and the open loop fell right in front of the alligator.

In the less remote sections the alligator is fearful, for it has learned the menace of man. But this one had possibly never seen a human being before. When the rope fell it moved forward a few feet and became quiet again. Org gave the rope a quick jerk, and the loop caught under one of the alligator’s front feet and over his head. Org was standing by a limb upon the fallen tree, bracing himself to keep his balance. Quickly he twisted his end of the rope around the limb and tied it.

The creature was still unaware that it was captive. Org threw a few branches from the tree in its direction, and it crawled slowly forward a few feet. At last it came to the end of the rope.

A hoarse, coughlike bark rang through the forest, and instantly that six-foot alligator was a snarling fury as it entered into combat with its bonds. For ten minutes the two frightened boys beheld the most terrifying spectacle they had ever imagined. Org scuttled down from the treetrunk and took refuge with Little Bit upon the back of the mule, making ready for instant flight.

Within a radius of that rope the alligator beat down the marsh-grass as flat as if a road-rolling machine had passed over it. He got into the low underbrush and pounded it down, making a noise like an express train with his powerful clawing feet and his slapping tail. He roared and raised himself almost upright on his tail, and clawed at the rope with his front feet as a man would fight with his hands, and snapped his great jaws together like the slapping of two clapboards.

But he could never succeed in getting the rope between his teeth, for the reason that he could not turn his head or lower his chin. Finally, in an awful burst of fury, he threw himself backward, rolled over and over, slapping, thrashing, clawing, snarling, uttering awful coughlike barks to which a thousand echoes in the forest responded in kind. The boys wondered at the creature’s catlike agility, shuddered at the concentrated venomous fury of the battle, quivered with awe at the agonizing, snarling vociferation emitted from between those terrible, gnashing, snapping teeth.

Yet the very configuration of the woods fought for the boys. The rope was constantly taut, for the reason that it could hardly be moved without becoming entangled with roots and cypress knees and the tough underbrush and the clinging, almost unbreakable vines called bamboo. The struggle against these obstacles slowly exhausted the alligator’s strength.

At last he sank down and remained quiet.

After a while the boys mustered their courage and crept forward to see. They found their captive had twisted the rope around the cypress knees and projecting roots until he was tied to the ground and helpless. His eyes were not sleepy now. They glowed with baleful flames, ugly, piglike, with glints of green in their fires of fury. The big mouth gaped wide when he saw the boys, and the jaws snapped with frightful force.

After a consultation, the two boys ran across the clearing to a switch-cane jungle and cut two long cane poles. Returning with these, they began to prod and torment the alligator, thrusting the poles into his mouth when he opened it; and when he no longer would let them look at his tongue, they still pursued their medical examination by punching him in every place where they thought he might have a particularly tender spot.

This roused him to another performance, a fury of struggle in which he fought and roared and barked and clawed at the rope, and thrashed with his tail, and chased the two boys up a tree until his activities abated.

All day long they tormented the alligator, exhausting every resource in their efforts to get him, as they expressed it, “to cut up some more.” But after five or six hours there was no more fight in him.

When the alligator showed plainly that he had made positively his last appearance as an entertainer, the boys decided it was time to start for home.

“How we gwine git our rope back?” Little Bit asked.

“Let that old sucker keep his old rope. I don’t want it,” Org said, wiping the sweat from his face on the sleeve of his shirt and sitting down in utter weariness.

“Marse Tom will bust us ef we leaves dat rope out in dese here woods,” Little Bit warned him. “Ropes comes high in de store ef you got to pay fer ’em.”

“I’ll tell Uncle Tom where it is, and let him come after it when he wants it,” Org replied.

“You better not let dat white man know we been out here monkeyin’ wid a alligator,” Little Bit said. “He’ll sell our mule an’ put me in jail an’ flay de hide offen you.”

“That’s so,” Org agreed. “Well, the old alligator is nearly dead. Let’s tie our end of the rope to the saddle and make old Jinx drag the alligator up to the house. Then when he dies we can get the rope off him.”

Little Bit agreed to this, and it was not hard to do. They had whipped the alligator until there was no more fight in him, and wearied him until there was not more strength to fight. Their hardest work was untwisting the rope, for as they got nearer to the alligator they had to pry the rope from around the roots and snags with a pole. They never got the courage to get close to those jaws which had snapped at them so terribly.

Jinx did not object to a little light hauling when a white boy walked on one side and a black boy on the other, acting as escort of honor. The alligator was easily dragged over the marsh-grass and along the animal trails toward the town. Although dragged for over three miles, he at no time showed resistance or attempted to “cut up.”

In the rear of the Gaitskill stables there was a large pig-pen, to which admittance was gained by a gate. Org led the mule in such a way that the alligator faced the gate. Then he led the mule around to the other side of the pen, led him forward, and thus dragged the alligator through the open gate.

Then the boys took a rake, hung one of the teeth through the loop in the rope, and by considerable juggling they managed to make the loop loose and large.

“Now, if he kicks around any before he dies, he’ll walk out of that rope,” Org announced. “Then we won’t have to say anything about it.”

“Dat big old animile ain’t gwine die,” Little Bit chuckled. “Us ain’t hurt him none, an’ by dis time to-morrer he’ll be ready to fix fer anodder fight.”

“I’m through fighting alligators,” Org said wearily. “I never was as hungry and tired in my life. But we’ll keep this old sucker in his pen and make him our pet alligator.”

Org and Little Bit loved to play in an old storehouse situated in the corner of the yard in the rear of Gaitskill’s home. There was a reason. Both loved sweets, and in that house was where Colonel Gaitskill stored his famous ribbon-cane sirup.

This sweet, so famous in the State, is not marketable. When once it is put in a barrel or other container, it cannot be moved or it will turn to sugar. Even with the greatest care, it is pretty sure to turn sugary before it is all used up. The sugar forms first a hard crust around the inside of the barrel and around the spigot from which it is drawn. Sometimes you can turn that spigot on full and the stream will be a tiny thread of liquid sweetness which flows with exasperating slowness. A moment later the sugary obstruction may break from around the spigot, and after that, the flood!

Doubtless Shakespeare had such a catastrophe in mind when he wrote of

Half a dozen times a day Org and Little Bit slipped into this storeroom, turned on the spigot of the sirup barrel, caught the tiny stream of sweetness in the palms of their hands, and lapped it out with their tongues.

They were at that enjoyable diversion now.

Suddenly there was a loud whoop of fright from the direction of the orchard where Mustard Prophet had gone to gather some figs for lunch. The boys ran to the door and looked out. They saw Mustard climb down from a rickety step-ladder, fold that ladder together and hurl it in the direction of some object. Then he came out of that orchard, stepping high like a turkey wading through mud, looking constantly behind him, and making as many different noises with his mouth as a whole brass band.

Hopey, thinking he had been bitten by a snake, met him half-way to the house.

“Whut ails you, Mustard?” she asked.

“My Gawd, Hopey!” he panted. “Dar’s a alligator out in dat orchard fawty feet long! I seen it!”

The noise Mustard made had brought all the members of the family out to see what the trouble was. When he told them of seeing the alligator, Org said nothing, and the others of the household were skeptical and laughed at him.

“How do you know you saw an alligator?” Colonel Gaitskill asked.

“I throwed a step-ladder at it, Marse Tom,” Mustard wailed. “It wus longer dan de ladder.”

“Come back to the orchard and show me,” Gaitskill ordered.

“Naw, suh!” Mustard whooped. “Go look fer yo’se’f, boss. Dis nigger is done seen aplenty!”

“Whut wus he doin’ in dat orchard?” Hopey howled.

“He wus aimin’ to climb dat step-ladder an’ bite my leg off when I seen him,” Mustard shuddered. “I gib him de ladder an’ tole him he could take my place!”

“Don’t make so much noise, Mustard,” Gaitskill commanded, as he turned away and entered the house. Nobody credited Mustard’s story, except Org and Little Bit, and they slipped away as soon as they could to see if their alligator was still in captivity.

They found that he had escaped, and a broad trail led across the dust of the pig-lot toward the orchard. The alligator had crawled through a hole. The boys promptly decided not to enter the orchard for any purpose whatsoever. Thinking further, they decided they had better absent themselves from home for the day, for that alligator might do all sorts of sensational stunts, and they had seen enough of his performances the day before.

Besides, Colonel Gaitskill might want to know how the creature got on the premises, and Org had found that the best way to avoid answering questions was to be where questions could not be addressed to him.

At that moment there came to the ears of the two boys a dull explosion. They turned their faces in the direction of the sound and left home.

It is a pity that they did not first return to the storehouse and turn off the spigot of the molasses barrel. But they did not. That sirup ran two days and one night!

One of the annoyances of agriculture in Louisiana is stumps. Whenever a farmer undertakes to blast the stumps out of the ground with dynamite or powder, he is sure to have a crowd of small boys to watch him. Org had been on the trail of the dynamiters for a number of days. Whenever they heard an explosion, they knew that some farmer was having a celebration of fireworks and profanity, and they hurried to the spot, guided by the explosive noises.

By being around, they had surreptitiously acquired a number of dynamite caps, also several yards of fuse in various lengths. The sound they had heard a few minutes before was over in the direction of the Cooley bayou, and they went.

What they saw when they got there, put the fear of dynamite in their souls forever.

There was a man who lived on the Cooley bayou who walked on a wooden peg. He had attempted to dynamite a fish-hole. He lighted the fuse of the dynamite stick and walked toward the pool to toss the stick into the water. His wooden peg found a soft place in the earth, and he sank into the mire up to his knees. He pitched forward on his face, the stick of dynamite fell from his hand and rolled just a few feet out of reach. The peg leg was twisted under the sod and marsh-grass in such a way that the unfortunate man could not tear himself loose and escape from the stick of dynamite.

The explosion tore a hole in the ground in which a large automobile might have been easily concealed, and friends of the cripple found scraps of him hanging in the trees a hundred yards away.

Org and Little Bit arrived just in time to view the effects of the tragedy, and came away with a deep impression of the explosive power of dynamite.

“Dat stuff ain’t nothin’ fer us to fool wid, Marse Org,” Little Bit said earnestly. “Jes’ look whut dat little stick of dynamite done to dat big growed-up man. Ef a wad of dynamite wus to bust close to us, de white folks would hab to put on deir readin’ specks to find de pieces, an’ dey’d tote us bofe back to Tickfall on a shingle.”

“I know where plenty of blasting powder is,” Org remarked. “Uncle Tom has a whole keg of powder in his barn.”

“Dat’s de stuff fer us to monkey wid,” Little Bit agreed. “Us don’t hab to play wid so much at one time dat we git blowed plum’ away.”

They found the keg of powder and carried it down to the little branch which ran around the edge of the town. They were very careful as they went around the stable, not to step on the alligator. As they carried their powder away, they looked back frequently to assure themselves that the alligator was not in pursuit. When at last they had reached the woods, they decided that it would be a good idea to make several loud explosions to scare the alligator and keep him from coming in that direction.

They spent several hours experimenting with the powder, enjoying themselves in a variety of dangerous ways without coming to any harm.

Then Little Bit thought of a hollow log under the wooden bridge that crossed this little branch on the road to the Nigger-Heel plantation. The log was about four feet long, the hollow through the center being about four inches in diameter, and extending nearly the entire length. To the imagination of boys, this thing would be suggestive of a cannon. When Little Bit showed the log to Orren Gaitskill, that was the first thought in his mind.

“Let’s put some gunpowder in this log and shoot her off,” he proposed. “It’s just like a cannon.”

“Us ain’t got no fuse-hole,” Little Bit remarked.

“We can go up to Uncle Tom’s and borrow a auger and bore a fuse-hole,” Org replied. “I know where an auger is.”

They concealed their keg of powder under some brush and spent an hour going after the tool, playing along the road both coming and going. Then they took turns in working, as they bored the hole.

“Less load her up now and shoot off, and that’ll make an end of a perfect day,” Org remarked, quoting a part of a song he had heard his sister sing to Captain Kerlerac.

“Dis ole cannon is gwine use up all our powder,” Little Bit declared, as he peeped up the hollow to where the light of the fuse-hole showed.

“We don’t care,” Org laughed. “This powder don’t cost us nothing.”

They placed their fuse properly, then emptied the contents of the keg into the muzzle of the log cannon. They rammed the charge home with a number of old sacks which they had been thoughtful enough to pick up in the barn and bring with them when they went after the augur. Then they added several hat-loads of leaves and grass which they mixed with mud from the branch. After that they charged the “cannon” to the very end with great quantities of sod torn up from the edge of the branch and rammed hard into the muzzle with the blunt end of a big stick.

“Now she’s ready to shoot. Who’s going to light the fuse?” Org asked.

“Not me,” Little Bit said positively. “I’m jes’ a little fool nigger, an’ ain’t to be trusted wid no important jobs.”

“I’ll light the fuse,” Org announced. “Go up on the road and see if anybody is coming.”

Little Bit ran up on the little frail wooden bridge which was about twelve feet long, made a survey, and announced that all was clear. Then he ran far over in the woods.

Org lighted the fuse and followed his black companion at his best speed. When they reached what they thought was a safe distance, they paused and waited.

The idea of the boys was that the powder would simply shoot the mud out of the log, just as a bullet is propelled from the muzzle of a gun. But blasting powder is not a propulsive force; it is something that rends and tears, exerting as much pressure in one direction as in another.

Therefore the boys were very much surprised, when they heard the explosion, to see the frail wooden bridge which spanned the narrow branch rise in the air, break into a number of pieces, and scatter all over the place!

The log cannon went to pieces also.

The boys went somewhere else. They did not run. They could easily have overtaken and passed anybody that was merely running. They just went away from there.

When completely overcome by exhaustion, they dropped down under a tree far away from the scene of their exploit. When, after a long time, they had somewhat recovered their composure and their breath, they began to plan for the future, when, as they thought, they would have to give an account of themselves.

“What does the law do to a feller that busts up a bridge, Little Bit?” Org asked.

“Ef he’s a nigger, like me, dey hangs him,” Little Bit shuddered.

“But if he’s white?” Org inquired.

“Dey shoots him,” Little Bit said.

“Then we won’t confess,” Org announced decisively.

They meditated awhile, and again Org asked a question.

“Did anybody see us with that kag of powder?”

“Nope. Us wus all alone.”

“Then we needn’t say anything about that kag,” Org declared. “Uncle Tom won’t miss it for some time.”

“Don’t we say nothin’ about nothin’ bustin’?” Little Bit asked.

“No.”

“Look at all de scratches dat de briars cut on my face when I wus runnin’ away,” Little Bit pointed. “How’s I gwine esplain dese here scratches? I got to say dat somepin’ busted on me, ain’t I?”

“No, you fool!” Org exclaimed. “Don’t you ever confess that anything busted on you or that you were ever round any busting thing. Tell ’em that you cut your face—er——”

“You had better think up a powerful good lie,” Little Bit quavered. “My mammy, she kin ketch on powerful easy to tales.”

“Tell her that you cut your face—er—shaving!” Org replied, uttering the last word with triumphant emphasis.

“Dat shows you don’t know nothin’ about niggers,” Little Bit scoffed. “Most niggers ain’t got no hair on deir face an’ don’t never hab to shave. A nigger whut kin grow a moustacher an’ whiskers—he’s proud of hisse’f!”

“Aw, shucks,” Org said in disgust. “That ruins our perfectly good excuse.”

“My face don’t look like it’s been cut with a razor,” Little Bit said obstinately. “It looks like it’s been sawed acrost wid a lot of blackberry briars, dat’s whut.”

“I know it does, but you’ve got to tell some kind of tale to keep us from being found out,” Org said impatiently.

“We don’t hab to tell nothin’,” Little Bit sighed. “Dat bridge will say a plum’ plenty. It’ll preach a whole sermont.”

“Don’t you say nothing about that bridge,” Org howled. “Keep your mouth shut.”

“’Spose de white folks axes me?”

“Tell ’em you don’t know anything.”

“I’ll tell ’em dat,” Little Bit said doubtfully. “But ain’t gwine bear down on dat very hard. Ef a nigger tells too many lies, Gawd’ll kill him!”

“If you don’t tell a few about that bridge the white folks will kill you before God can get around to you,” Org declared.

Then there popped into Orren’s head, the final recourse of all the guilty, the establishment of a false alibi.

“Come on,” he howled, springing to his feet. “We’ll go back to town and prove to everybody that we have not been in the woods at all to-day. We’ll let ’em see us.”

XVI

A PAIR OF FEET

Dazzle Zenor went to the Hen-Scratch saloon and sent word to Skeeter that she must see him right away. When he came out to the rear, she lost no time in stating her business.

“Hopey jes’ come to my place an’ tole me dat dar ain’t no Gaitskills at home. Org an’ Little Bit is goned to de woods; Marse Tom is down to de bank, an’ ole miss an’ Miss Virginny is gone out fer a automobile ride; Mustard Prophet is gone out to de Nigger-Heel plantation, an’ is takin’ Hopey an’ Popsy Spout wid him to give ’em a outin’. Now is yo’ time to git de rabbit-foot.”

“Yes’m,” Skeeter agreed. “Dis time am choosen of de Lawd. Is you willin’ to he’p me?”

“Suttinly. I’s in on de reeward bill.”

“Dis is de plan,” Skeeter said. “I walks up to Marse Tom’s jes’ easylike, kinder moseyin’ along, an’ I sneaks in de back way an’ I sneaks out de back way an’ I walks down de back side of de hill an’ makes a roundance to de road at de front of de bottom of de hill.”

“Dat’s de properest way to do,” Dazzle said.

“Yo’ plan is dis,” Skeeter continued. “You drives my little automobile an’ waits fer me at de foot of de hill on de side of de road. You keeps dat engyne runnin’ an’ you heads dat machine to’rds out of town. We goes straight to de Nigger-Heel an’ gits our money.”

For half an hour Dazzle amused herself by riding around the town. It was Saturday afternoon, a great crowd of country negroes was in Tickfall, and the girl showed her skill as a driver by seeing how close she could shave to the tail of the farm-wagons and the rear end of the mules and horses and cattle that were on the street.

At one corner there was a drove of mules waiting to be sold at auction; a little farther up the street there was a herd of bony cattle that had been driven down from the hill farms to be sold; at another point there was a flock of sheep lying in the dust, panting with the heat. Around each of these there stood dozens of negroes, inspecting what was for sale whether they intended to buy or not. Dazzle greeted all these friends from the country, but firmly refused all requests for a ride, for she was watching the time, and was determined to be at the meeting-place when Skeeter arrived.

Skeeter sauntered around the streets for a little while, watching the auctioneer in his business and admiring his line of talk. Then he slipped quietly out of the crowded street and hurried to the home of Colonel Tom Gaitskill.

It was not difficult or dangerous to rob a house with nobody at home. Satisfying himself by an inspection, that he was really alone on the premises, Skeeter entered through the kitchen, went into the little back hall, climbed the back stairs, and entered the room of Miss Virginia Gaitskill. He opened the drawer in her dresser and took out the green-plush box, being careful not to disarrange anything in the drawer. He paused long enough to open the box and assure himself that the rabbit-foot was in it, then he placed the box in the inner pocket of his coat and went out as quietly as he had come.

It had been so easy that he decided to go out the front way and thus avoid the long detour necessary if he went down the hill on the far side and had to walk around to the road. He peeped around the corner of the house in the front, and dodged back in a hurry.

He saw Org and Little Bit climbing over the fence into the horse-lot. They looked tired, as if they had run a long distance, and they looked either excited or scared, as if something unusual had happened; and they were in a hurry, for they climbed the fence rather than take the time to open and shut the gate.

Skeeter’s short hair stood upon his cranium like hog-bristles. Had Orren Randolph Gaitskill found out in some way that he was trying to steal the rabbit-foot? Could Little Bit have been around the saloon and overheard the conversation about the rabbit-foot between himself and Dazzle? Were they coming to the house now to protect this precious green-plush box from theft?

“I reckin I’s gwine take de long roundance,” Skeeter muttered in a panicky tone as he ran with all his speed toward the rear of the house, keeping the building between himself and the two boys, and when he started down the hill, dodging from bush to bush like a rabbit.

But the boys had something on their minds besides Skeeter Butts. On their long run from the little branch where the bridge had been blown up, Org had thought of something that would attract the attention of the people in Tickfall and register in their minds the fact that he and Little Bit were in town.

Org had ridden with his Uncle Tom in the automobile, and had seen Colonel Gaitskill shut off the power from the engine and coast down the hill from his house to the town. This had given Org an idea on which he had been working for several days. Under a shed in the rear of the Gaitskill stable there was an abandoned, worn-out buggy, without any shafts. Org had tied a rope to each end of the front axle near the front wheels, and had found by experiment that he could guide the buggy by pulling on the rope, just as if he were driving a horse. Little Bit had pushed the buggy around the smooth, level horse-lot and Org had been able to guide it without difficulty.

So now, confronting this emergency, he decided that the best game he could play would be that of coasting down the Gaitskill hill toward the town in that old buggy. It would be plenty of fun of a kind that would attract attention from those in town.

He instructed Little Bit what to do, and the two boys pushed the buggy out of the horse-lot and stopped it on the brow of the hill. Org climbed into his buggy on the top of the hill just about the time that Skeeter Butts seated himself in his automobile beside Dazzle Zenor at the foot of the hill.

The two started about the same time.

Skeeter planned to go up the street about a block, then turn to his right and go out the principal street to the Nigger-Heel plantation.

Org expected to stop at the foot of the hill, and push his buggy back to the top and coast down again.

One thing that Org had overlooked was that his Uncle Tom’s automobile had a brake. The buggy lacked that very important accessory, and when Little Bit pushed it off and climbed on behind, it had not traveled one hundred feet until it was going thirty miles an hour. Half-way down the hill it was “doing fifty,” and at the foot of the hill it was just a rattling horror of incredible speed with momentum enough to carry it half a mile on a level road.

That Providence which looks out for fools, drunken men, and children, gave the buggy just the right turn at the right time to shoot it out toward Main Street. Its momentum carried it across the street like a rocket, sent it plunging madly across the court-house lawn, hurled it into the middle of a lot in the rear of the court-house where the country people hitched their horses and mules, and there it ended its sensational and spectacular flight by colliding with a hitching-rack, spilling out the two boys like peas are tossed from a spoon, and tearing itself to pieces!

The two youngsters sprang up unhurt and made tracks away from there.

One old mule had seen the buggy coming over the court-house lawn with nothing to pull it and nothing to push it. It did not look natural to him; it made the same impression on him that a pair of pants would make on you if you saw the pants coming down the street with nobody in them.

That mule opened his great mouth and uttered a trumpetlike bray just as the vehicle hung up on the hitching-rack. Then mister mule broke his bridle and went galloping up the street, looking back and bawling with every jump.

Every mule in the hitching-lot promptly broke loose and went galloping after the first mule, also looking back at the strange vehicle which had come among them. All the horses followed, neighing their fright, some pulling buggies and some wagons; some with harness on, some with saddles, and as they all went up the street together, every horse and mule on both sides of the street broke away and joined in the procession.

Many of the animals did not know what it was all about. But it is a fact that if one runaway starts down a street, all the other horses and mules will run with him. They believe in safety first.

Two blocks away there was a herd of cattle standing in the middle of the street being sold at auction. They saw the cyclone coming and fled before it. A block farther up the street a flock of terrified sheep saw the cattle coming, and started out ahead of the cows. A block farther on a drove of hogs saw the sheep coming, and they also believed in safety first, and decided to get there first, so they led the procession.

As the grunting, bleating, bellowing, braying, nickering procession of animals swept forward, all the country dogs which had followed their masters into town from every point of the compass fell in behind and became a mighty chorus of yelping, barking canines, and their number was augmented and their chorus strengthened by all the dogs which Tickfall could contribute. And all the men, women, and children, white and black, and all the shades of color between, swept out of the stores and offices and shops to see what the disturbance was about, and these fell in behind and added their multitudinous shoutings to the noise and excitement which was like the ululation of wind and wave during a great storm at sea.

In an incredible time the principal street of Tickfall was swept clean of all its live stock and of all its men, but it was littered everywhere with pieces of broken buggies, broken wagons, broken harness, and a dust-cloud was settling upon that vacated street as if Mother Nature was trying to bury what was left out of her sight.

Now for the luck which attends the escapades of youth: every person on the street had looked toward the teams which were running away, and not back at what had originally caused their flight. Those boys had careened over the court-house yard, had come to smash in the middle of the hitching-lot, and had got up and gone away from there without being seen by a single person who identified them as the source of all the trouble. As for Colonel Gaitskill’s buggy, he never missed it, and if he had, he could never have identified it among the smashed and broken vehicles that were junked in the hitching-lot after the animals broke loose.

The farmers knew that if one mule runs away every other mule follows; so the poor mule who first saw the buggy and uttered his frightened bawl was blamed for the whole catastrophe!

As for Skeeter Butts and Dazzle Zenor, they were about two blocks from the court-house when they heard that first terrified bray behind them. In a moment the braying and bawling and bleating and squealing and barking and yelling increased greatly.

We have the best authority for the statement that the wicked flee where no man pursueth.

Skeeter and Dazzle decided that all the inhabitants of Tickfall were after them for the theft of the rabbit-foot!

Skeeter took one look behind him at that cloud of dust, caught hold of his spark lever and pulled it down to the last notch, then slowly opened his throttle until it could go no farther. The speed of his flight broke all records in Louisiana for his make of automobile.

His eyes were upon the road just as far ahead of him as he could see, for he knew that going at his present speed it would take a long time to stop. In less than a minute he was drawing near to the bridge over the little branch where Org and Little Bit had played with the “cannon” a short time before to the complete wreckage of that frail structure. Skeeter knew this bridge was too narrow for him to cross at his present rate of progress, and he began to slow up.

Suddenly Dazzle uttered a terrified shriek and pointed ahead—the bridge was gone!

Skeeter shut off all the power, pressed with all his strength upon the foot-brake, set his emergency brake with all the muscle in his arm, came to the very edge of the branch, going no faster than a boy could push a wheelbarrow, and—rolled in!

Dazzle Zenor foresaw what would happen and jumped out. But Skeeter was behind the wheel and could not move quick enough, and he went down ten feet into the creek with his little machine.

There was the crack of a broken spring, the explosion of two blown-out tires, the rending, grinding noise of torn fenders, and the terrified wailing of a little barkeeper who had been bounced out into the creek and who had his clothes wet and his feelings hurt and nothing else!

And even that wailing ceased when Skeeter heard what was coming. Dazzle saw it coming first. She could not get off the road because of a barbed-wire fence on each side, so she hopped down into the water of the branch beside Skeeter. And there, crouched beside the bank of the creek, they saw the strangest sight two people ever witnessed.

First, a herd of hogs came squealing to the broken bridge, looked down at them, uttered a surprised series of grunts, split into two parties and ran down into the creek and over into the woods. Next followed a flock of bleating sheep, and they took a look at Skeeter and Dazzle, split into two like the pigs had done, some going down on one side, some on the other, and all of them scattering in the woods. Then followed a herd of cattle, then a lot of mules and horses, then a great multitude of dogs, then excited men in automobiles, then men, women, and children afoot!

All of them without exception came to the very edge of the branch where the bridge was broken, looked down at Skeeter and Dazzle, expressed surprise either by grunt or squeal or bellow or bray or neigh or yell or laugh—then turned to one side and went down into the branch and into the woods!

By the time this unique procession had arrived at one end of the broken bridge, a farm-wagon drove up and stopped at the other end. The wagon contained Mustard and Hopey Prophet and Popsy Spout on their way to town from the Nigger-Heel plantation. Popsy was asleep.

About seven hundred people had assembled at that spot, and nearly all the live stock in the Parish was out in the woods!

To Skeeter’s unbounded amazement he found himself a wounded hero instead of a criminal and a captured fugitive.

“Did the stock run you down on the bridge, Skeeter?” Sheriff Flournoy asked; and that gave Skeeter his cue.

“Yes, suh. De bridge is been pretty rickety a long time, an’ dem animiles piled up all aroun’ me an’ we jes’ nachelly all went down.”

“If you want to bring suit against this Parish for injuries to yourself and damage to your automobile, I’ll help you,” Colonel Gaitskill snapped. “I’ve been telling that road commissioner to repair this bridge for the last three years, and now he’ll get what is coming to him, and we’ll make him pay for his neglect of duty.”

That word “damages” sounded good to Skeeter.

“I’s pretty bad hurt, Marse Tom,” he sighed, when he saw a chance to collect money for his injuries. “Bofe ankles is spraint an’ my back is busted, an’ my neck feels kinder stretched and loose, an’ my head——”

“Tell all that to the trial jury,” Gaitskill snapped. “You can ride back in the wagon with Mustard Prophet—I think you had better go on right now!”

Mustard drove down into the woods and, crossing the branch, came up on the other side of the broken bridge to the road. It took four men to help Skeeter in the wagon, so great were his injuries after he heard that magic word—damages!

The first place they passed on the way back was the Shin Bone eating-house. Skeeter decided that this was a good place to demonstrate how badly hurt he was, and he could exhibit his disability in the presence of many witnesses.

“I cain’t trabbel a inch furder, brudders,” he sighed. “I’s gittin’ weaker an’ weaker all de time. You better drap me off here at de resteraw.”

So Mustard picked him up from the bed of the wagon, carried him bodily into the eating-house and laid him out on one of the dining-tables. Dazzle and Hopey and Popsy Spout followed them in, and Shin Bone hurried to see what the trouble was.

“I think I’s fixin’ to die, Mustard,” Skeeter wailed, thrusting his yellow hand into the inside pocket of his coat. “So I passes dis little thing over to you befo’ I j’ines de angel band dat toots de horns aroun’ de golden throne.”

The little thing was a green-plush box containing a rabbit-foot.

“Dat reminds my mind, Mustard,” Shin Bone exclaimed, as he beheld the box. “I got somepin dat b’longs to you, too.”

He went to his cash-drawer, opened it, and in an apartment underneath he brought out his treasure and handed it to Mustard.

It was a green-plush box containing a rabbit-foot.

Skeeter’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. As for Mustard, he was so completely dumfounded that he merely stared at the two green-plush boxes in helpless wonder.

“Whar did you git dis green-plush box, Skeeter?” Mustard asked at last.

“Ask Dazzle,” Skeeter wailed. “She knows—you know, too.”

“Whar you git yo’ green-plush box, Shin?” Mustard asked next, in a tone of superstitious consternation.

“About three weeks ago, ole Popsy Spout went out to yo’ house to spend de day. When he got back, he come in here an’ et, an’ he lef’ dis green box on de eatin’ table. He explavicated about it a little bit an’ said it b’longed to you!”

Mustard turned around with the righteous fury of Michel the archangel contending with the devil to “bring against him a railing accusation”—but, alas, Popsy had taken a hint from Skeeter’s recumbent attitude, and was stretched out upon a dining-table sound asleep.

The unexpected duplication of the rabbit-feet and the two boxes had the effect of relieving Skeeter’s pretended injuries to the extent that he was able to travel a little farther.

“Take me home, Mustard,” he wailed. “Lemme die at home in my own little cabin whut Marse John gib to me.”

Mustard quickly understood that what Skeeter really wanted was to get to some place where he could talk about the new complication in the matter of luck charms. He lifted Skeeter in his arms and carried him back to the wagon, leaving Popsy asleep upon the table, and leaving Dazzle and Hopey to find their own conveyance to their house in their own feet.

When Mustard and Skeeter had closed the door upon their conference in Skeeter’s cabin, Mustard laid the rabbit-foot on Skeeter’s knee.

“You got to take it back, brudder,” he said earnestly. “’Twon’t do fer us folks to steal Marse Tom’s rabbit-foot. Us is got to ack hones’.”

“Mebbe so,” Skeeter said doubtfully. “But fur’s I’m concerned, Marse Tom kin hop along widout dis foot.”

“It cain’t be did, Skeeter. You got to take it back.”

“I done been hurt in a automobile bust-up,” Skeeter protested. “I ain’t able to git about. De dorctor will come here in a little while an’ examinate me fer cote-house damages on account my many injuries.”

“I makes dis trade wid you,” Mustard replied. “You’s got fifty dollars of my money dat you ain’t earnt because you didn’t recover my lucky foot. I’ll gib you dat fifty to tote dis foot back.”

“I got you,” Skeeter answered promptly. “When do I tote her back?”

“To-morrer night,” Mustard told him. “Marse Tom is gibin’ a big dinner at his house an’ you kin slip in de house while dey is eatin’.”

“I’ll do it,” Skeeter promised. “But dis is de last thing I’s gwine do fer you as long as I live. No more detecative stealin’ jobs fer me!”

XVII

LUCK AND LOVE

The next day, being Sunday and a dull day, Skeeter found it both convenient and comfortable to remain in bed and pretend to be severely injured by his automobile accident. He planned to spend the day in bed, and slip out at night and carry the rabbit-foot back to the dresser-drawer in Miss Virginia’s room.

But about ten o’clock the road commissioner called upon Skeeter, expressed his great regret at the automobile accident and told Skeeter he had come to settle for the damage that had been done.

“I don’t want any lawsuit, Skeeter. It takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of money which has to be paid to the lawyers and the courts. We’ll fix this up between ourselves.”

“Dat suits me,” Skeeter told him.

“I’ll have your automobile repaired, put in perfect condition, painted and polished and fixed like new. Besides that I’ll give you one hundred dollars.”

With these words, he laid the money out on his knee, one hundred dollars in one-dollar bills.

Skeeter sat up, reached for the money, and thrust it under his pillow on the bed.

“Whar do I sign?” he grinned.

The smiling commissioner indicated the dotted line, Skeeter inscribed his name with a flourish, and before that gentleman was out of the yard Skeeter was kicking off the bed covers, preparing to dress and go out.

“Dis here is my lucky day,” he announced to his immortal soul.

About this time, Orren Randolph Gaitskill, returning from Sunday-school, met Little Bit who had been waiting for him at the corner for an hour. The two boys played around the streets for a while, then wandered aimlessly down the alley and into a vacant place in the rear of the Gaitskill store. There they found something which interested them very much.

It was a discarded advertisement.

A piece of cardboard, life-size, represented a big, grinning negro man. Both arms were folded across his chest and he was hugging a brand of cured meat called the Hallelujah Ham to his bosom while his great mouth was wide-spread in a toothsome grin of anticipation over its sugar-cured sweetness. Having served its purpose, this cardboard man had been tossed upon the trash heap to be carted away. Org and Little Bit beat the trash man to it and regarded it as a great possession.

They carried the thing to the corner of the street and set it up in the middle of the alley.

A negro woman passed, humming a tune. When she saw the big negro, she jumped to one side with loud bawl:

“My Gawd! Who you tryin’ to skeer?”

When she saw it was merely a cardboard standing up, she went laughing down the street.

“This is our lucky day, Little Bit,” Org chuckled. “We can have a heap of fun with this thing. There is plenty of fun scaring people if they don’t get mad and fight you afterwards.”

“Niggers don’t fight when dey is skeart,” Little Bit said. “Dey runs.”

“But we can’t play with this to-day,” Org said virtuously, recalling his recent Sunday-school instructions. “This is the Sabbath of the Lord and this big negro man ought to rest on this day. We’ll take him up to my house and lay him down in the stable so he can rest.”

“Restin’ time an’ Sonday shore sounds good to a nigger,” Little Bit giggled. “Even dis here paper pasteboard man is a-grinnin’.”

But this was not a day of rest at the Gaitskill home. They were arranging to give a great dinner that evening at which would be announced the engagement of Miss Virginia Gaitskill and Captain Kerley Kerlerac.

All day long Hopey Prophet, famous cook, was preparing that dinner, Dazzle Zenor was helping in the kitchen, Mustard Prophet was errand boy, Skeeter Butts was slipping in and out of Hopey’s cabin in the yard, seizing such opportunities as he could find to discuss with Mustard the return of the rabbit-foot.

Org was called in and impressively informed that his beautiful sister was engaged to Captain Kerlerac and the announcement would be made that evening; that he would not be permitted to be at the dinner because he had to be corrected seventeen times at an ordinary meal, and this occasion was so extraordinary that he was eliminated.

“I don’t care—I’m glad I’m out of it,” Org growled. “Gince didn’t ask me nothing about her business and I’m not going to help her through. Let old Gince go and get herself engaged. Little Bit says that Cap’n Kerley is a easy boss.”

“What I want you to do is to be a good boy all day and stay around the house,” Mrs. Gaitskill requested.

“I’ll promise not to leave this place all day,” Org said. “There’s nothin’ doing on Sunday nohow.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Gaitskill said, much relieved by the promise. “If you are very good, I’ll promise to do something very nice for you.”

“Will you lemme have a party and invite Little Bit?” Org asked.

“Oh, dear! I can’t promise what I will do just now,” Mrs. Gaitskill smiled.

“Say!” Org exclaimed, struck by a sudden thought. “Don’t I get anything to eat out of this?”

“Certainly. But you’ll have to wait until the others have eaten.”

“Is Little Bit in on the eats, too?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll be good,” Org announced.

And he kept his promise. He and Little Bit played in the stable all day long. About dark it pleased his fancy to carry his cardboard negro man to the house where there could be no danger of anyone stealing it. At first he thought he would take it up to his own room, then he decided to store it in a room which Colonel Gaitskill called his “office,” for he knew that no one would enter that room that night.

The Gaitskill home was arranged in this fashion: Entering the front door a guest stepped into the reception room in the rear of which was a staircase leading to the bed-rooms above. On the left of the reception room was the dining-room, behind that the butler’s pantry and the kitchen. In the rear of the staircase was a back hall with a flight of back stairs leading to the bed-rooms above. On the right of the reception room was the drawing-room, and in the rear of that, entered by folding doors, was what Mrs. Gaitskill called a library, and Miss Virginia called a den, and Colonel Gaitskill called his office.

In this “office” Org set up his cardboard man, knowing that Gaitskill never entered this room on Sunday, and that no guest would be admitted to it that night.

As Org came out of the room, he was captured by Dazzle Zenor, who conducted him to his room, ordered him to bathe, and superintended his dressing. Then she dismissed him with instructions not to leave the house and hastened to assist Miss Virginia with her toilet.

Orren sneaked down to the dining-room and gazed with awe at the wonderfully picturesque table; boylike, he began to seek what he might devour. There was nothing good to eat on the table yet, nothing on the sideboard. He pulled open a door in the sideboard, and found far back a cut-glass dish full of candies.

“Oo-oo!” he exclaimed. “Candy mints! They put ’em way back here to hide ’em from me!” and he filled his pockets.

Then he smuggled Little Bit up-stairs to his room to keep him company, and showed him the candy mints.

“Dat looks good to me,” the little negro said.

“I bet it’ll make our mouths run water to eat ’em. When eatin’ time comes, us is gwine expe’unce joy.”

“We’ll lay ’em on this table till everybody goes to eating down-stairs,” Org said.

There were some Tickfall notables at that dinner.

There was Dr. Sentelle, clergyman, a hang-over from Civil War times, an unreconstructed rebel, a cripple since Antietam, whose voice was music, whose speech was eloquence, and every word a caress; whose face was beautiful, written all over with the literature of experience. There was John Flournoy, who had served forty years as sheriff of the Parish, a man with the physical frame of an ox, the strength of Samson, a mouth like a bear trap, and the gentle heart of a woman—the little children followed him on the streets. There was Judge Haddan, a pale, sickly man with a weak voice, trembling hands, and the stooped shoulders of the student; but his head was massive and Websterian, his eyes glowed like the eyes of some jungle beast, and no man within the borders of the State commanded more respect as a lawyer and a jurist. There was Colonel Gaitskill, the host, serene, powerful, with his snow-white beard and hair, his face glowing like an alabaster vase with a lamp in it, such a man as one beholds once in a lifetime and remembers forever. And around these a bevy of women and girls who had known these men since their babyhood.

And there was the girl of the evening, Miss Virginia Harwick Gaitskill, descendant of a long line of beautiful women and handsome men, her skin like the faint iridescence of pearls, her eyes like cornflower sapphires, her hair like cobweb, thick and wavy, colored like the heart of a ripe chestnut burr, her whole face like pearl and pomegranate and peachbloom, with the amber nimbus above it always from that soft brown hair, her laughter light and happy like a Sicilian shepherd’s reed, and her heart like oil on salt sea-water—all the beauties of the world moving, circling, advancing, retreating, but smoothing out all ruffled surfaces and stilling the storm!

And Captain Kerley Kerlerac, such a man as every mother wants her son to be that he might fill her heart and satisfy her love completely—but it is customary to ignore the man in a case like this, or dismiss him with faint praise.

The dinner was about half finished when Little Bit, in Orren’s room up-stairs, looked longingly at the candy mints upon the little table and remarked:

“All dem eaters down dar makes me feel hongry.”

“Me, too. Less eat our candy mints,” Org suggested.

“I’ll bet dey’ll make my mouf water when I gits ’em inside,” Little Bit chuckled. “My mouf is been waterin’ jes’ to look at ’em.”

Indeed, they did make his mouth water.

These candy mints were not what Orren Randolph Gaitskill thought they were. They were shaped like candy mints, but they contained no candy and no mint; they were little wafers, which dropped in water in the finger-bowls, would effervesce, causing the water to bubble and sparkle and look pretty.

Both boys grabbed a handful of these things and poured them in their mouths.

They tasted sweet. The saliva moistened them, and suddenly one of them exploded in each mouth. It was a very slight explosion, just enough to cause all the tablets to crumble into tiny pieces and get under their tongues and between their teeth, and fill the entire cavity of the mouth like an expanding balloon.

When the explosion occurred in Little Bit’s mouth, that little darky felt like the whole top of his head had been blown off, and he opened his mouth and uttered a startled bellow.

Then in both mouths, each little globule began to explode as the moisture penetrated it. Half a dozen popped under each tongue, several cracked between the teeth of the boys, and the vibration of the nerves of the teeth made them feel as if there was a sound like a pistol shot at each tiny explosion.

“Poison!” Org gurgled.

“P’ison!” Little Bit seconded.

The two boys decided that they needed expert medical attention at once. Dr. Moseley was down in the dining-room. They would not wait for him to come up; they would go down to him! They ran down the hall and galloped down the back steps, their feet making as much racket as a pair of mules crossing the gangplank of a steamboat. They burst into the dining-room, foaming at the mouth, their frothy tongues protruding, gargling their words as they tried to speak. Little Bit, his coal-black face smeared with foamy white bubbles, looked like he had swallowed the handle of a shaving brush and left the soapy end sticking out!

“I’m poisoned!” Org gargled.

“My Gawd! I’m p’isoned!” Little Bit squalled.

Simultaneously with the startling advent of the children in the dining-room, there came a scream, so shrill, so terror-fraught, so penetrating, that all the guests sprang to their feet in consternation.

From the kitchen, Dazzle Zenor’s voice sounded like a steam whistle:

“Oh, my Gawd! A alligator is tryin’ to git in dis kitchen!”

Almost instantly in the reception room there was a sound like the delivery of a ton of coal——

Skeeter Butts had fallen down-stairs!

Hopey Prophet, hearing all the commotion, started from the pantry to see what it was about; glancing across the back hall into Colonel Tom Gaitskill’s office, she beheld a strange negro man with a broad grin on his black face, hugging a Hallelujah Ham to his bosom!

She hurled herself into the dining-room among the astounded guests, her fat arms stretched up toward the ceiling, her dough-like face ashen with fright as she bawled at the top of her voice:

“Fer Gade ’lmighty’s sake, white folks! Dar’s a big nigger man in Marse Tom’s library!”

When Mustard Prophet heard Dazzle’s scream of fright, he rushed from a little side porch where he was waiting to serve the cream when they were ready, taking a pistol from his pocket as he ran. There had been no doubt in Mustard’s mind that he had really seen an alligator in the orchard the day before and he had armed himself for protection in case he saw it again.

But before Mustard got to the kitchen, he heard the sound made by Skeeter Butts in his tumble down the front stairs, so he changed his course and started in that direction.

Just as Mustard arrived in the reception room, he heard Hopey’s wild whoop and her statement that a strange negro was in the library. So Mustard ran across the drawing-room floor, pushed open the folding doors and entered the library, knocking over in his haste a cardboard representation of a negro man who stood holding a Hallelujah Ham to his bosom. Approaching from the rear of this figure, Mustard could not see what it was. It fell face downward and nobody recognized it.

Captain Kerley Kerlerac hastily excused himself from the table, stepped into the back hall on his way to the library. Looking about for a suitable weapon, he laid hold upon Orren’s baseball bat standing in the corner.

He entered the library through one door just as Mustard entered it through the other. Kerlerac closed his door behind him, thus shutting out the light from the little back hall by which Hopey had been able to see the cardboard figure, and which would have shown Kerlerac that the negro was Mustard whom he confronted. But Kerlerac was in the dark, and Mustard had the light from the drawing-room behind him. What Kerlerac saw was a big negro with a big pistol in his hand.

The battle began at once!

Mustard shot ten times at Captain Kerlerac, the bullets flying in every direction. Three of them entered the dining-room among the guests, having no effect except to splash the diners out of that room, like a brick splashes water when dropped into a puddle of mud!

The last bullet in Mustard’s pistol skimmed along the cheek of Kerlerac, making a long, painful cut, just under the lobe of his ear, adding one more bullet wound to the two he had previously received when he was fighting for Uncle Sam in the world war.

Then the captain’s baseball bat landed on the top of Mustard’s head and Mustard sank to the floor unconscious.

Kerlerac walked over with the intention of pounding the negro’s head to a jelly, but just then——

From a little house in the yard by the side of the residence, there sounded the thrilling scream of Miss Virginia Gaitskill. The woman he loved! A moment later she began to shriek, and in her tones were all the concentrated essence of agonized terror!

Miss Virginia, in her effort to escape from the flying bullets, had run out of the house through the kitchen. As she rushed out of the door into the yard, the light from the door shone full into the eyes of a six-foot alligator. He opened his mouth wide at her approach, and when she screamed, he snapped his jaws like a bear-trap!

The shrieking girl fled for refuge to the storehouse.

Alas!

A stream of sweetness from a barrel of ribbon-cane sirup had been running from the spigot for two days and one night. Over the floor of that storehouse was a pool of molasses one inch deep.

Virginia stepped into that mess and both her dainty slippers stuck! She screamed. She tried to retreat and stepped out of both her slippers, and her feet stood ankle-deep in the molasses. Then came a series of shrieks which were the essence of agonized terror!

Captain Kerley Kerlerac, leaving Mustard unconscious upon the floor, ran to the rescue of the beauty in distress. Plunging out of the kitchen door, he leaped over something which looked like an old mud-caked log, and which snapped at him viciously as he passed.

Failing to get a bite of the captain’s leg, the alligator walked around to the front of the house.

Kerlerac hurled himself through the door of the storehouse like a catapult.

Alas for the hero! Both feet landed in the molasses, both feet slipped from under him, he fell flat on his back, rolled over and over in the sweetness, and stopped his progress only when both feet struck against the empty barrel from which all that saccharine had dripped!

He sprang up, threw his sweet arms around the woman he loved, drew her close to his sirupy form, laid his bleeding cheek against her amber hair, and carried her forth to safety!

In the meantime, Skeeter Butts was lying in the reception room under a leather couch, grasping the green-plush box in his nervous hand.

He had started up-stairs to restore it to its rightful owner, just as Org and Little Bit, thinking they were poisoned, had run down the hallway above in their flight to the dining-room. Skeeter had turned his body to retreat, had lost his balance, and had fallen down the steps, taking refuge under the leather couch, where he was happy to remain during the subsequent scenes of that memorable night.

When the screams of Miss Virginia Gaitskill attracted all the guests to the rear of the house, Skeeter crawled from under the couch, crawled across the reception room, slipped out of the front door and began to crawl toward the gate.

Someone in the house turned the electric switch, causing the globe light on the front porch to flash up. Skeeter jumped, hastily concealed himself behind a bit of shrubbery, and glancing around him nervously, found himself squatting within two feet of an immense alligator.

The alligator opened his mouth like a door to the pit of the nether regions, and Skeeter, with that peculiar impulse which everyone has to strike, or throw something, at a peril, hurled the green-plush box into the alligator’s gaping mouth!

The jaws snapped together and the box containing the rabbit-foot was gone.

By that time Skeeter was gone too.

As soon as Mustard Prophet was identified, half a dozen armed men from the dinner party patroled the lawn with guns and flash-lights, hunting for the negro whom Hopey had seen. The alligator, disturbed by the flash-light, which whipped across the grass, crawled under the fence into the horse-pasture, and was there discovered and killed by Sheriff Flournoy.

Skeeter Butts, who was hiding in the bushes just across the road, drew a big sigh of relief.

“Dem white mens is done killed a alligator whut’s got five foots an’ dey don’t know it,” he chuckled. “One foot is gone down de red lane of his gullet in a cute green box!”

Skeeter waited until the men returned to the house and then moved away.

“I knows whar dat rabbit-foot is,” he muttered. “But I ain’t gwine atter it. No Jonah in de whale fer me!”

Over in the negro settlement called Dirty-Six, Skeeter entered the Hen-Scratch saloon, saying nothing of the exciting scenes he had witnessed that night. But his mind dwelt upon them, as evidenced by a song which he sang again and again:

Ten days had passed.

At the Nigger-Heel plantation Mustard Prophet, nursing a battered head, was curing an alligator skin which he had nailed upon a barn door, and was keeping careful guard over two green-plush boxes, each containing a rabbit-foot.

Mustard entered the junk-room full of Marse Tom’s curiosities, opened a drawer in a desk, and brought forth the two luck charms which had caused him so much trouble.

“It ’pears to me like dese here lef’ hind foots is lost dere power,” he muttered to himself.

He held up one box which looked rather messy, because Mustard had rescued it from an alligator’s stomach. He continued his soliloquy:

“Now you take de hist’ry of dis here foot: Cap’n Kerlerac gib dis’n to Miss Virginia Gaitskill fifteen years ago when she warn’t nothin’ but a little ole spindle-leg gal. An’ whut come to pass? Her paw an’ maw died in furin parts somewhar an’ she had to move back to Tickfall. Little Bit tole little Marse Org dat a rabbit-foot fotch luck, so he stole dis’n out of his sister’s room, swiped a pipe an’ smoked rabbit terbacker, an’ mighty nigh died. When Skeeter Butts tuck Org home an seen dis rabbit-foot, he thought it wus mine an’ I thought it wus mine because it looked jes’ like mine. So I sneaked up to Miss Virginia’s room to steal it back, an’ I had my hand on de very place whar it wus, when dat little ole Org boy skeart de gizzard outen me, playin’ Indian an’ whoopin’ behime my back.

“An’ Skeeter swiped dis foot fer me, an’ hopped in his automobile to make his escapement, an’ he run off a busted bridge into de Cooley bayou, chased by all de hawgs an’ sheeps an’ cattle an’ hosses an’ mules an’ dawgs an’ mens in Tickfall. Atter dat, Skeeter tried to fotch dis rabbit-foot back to Miss Virginia because it ’twarn’t de one we wanted, an’ he had dis foot on his own pusson when he tuck dat hell-bustin’ tumble down Marse Tom’s steps, an’ he had it in his hand when he snuck across de yard an’ dat alligator tried to eat him up. Den Skeeter throwed dis rabbit-foot, plush box an’ all, down dat alligator’s gullet, an’ whut happened to dat varmint atter he swallowed dis foot, an’ had all de luck inside his own hide? He got kilt!”

He laid this unlucky foot back in the green-plush box, placed it reverently in the drawer, shaking his head over the mystery how a luck charm could be attended with so much misfortune.

“Naw, suh, dis’n is done lost de power,” he announced.

Then he lifted the other green-plush box, lifted a rabbit-foot out of it, and gazed with sacred awe upon this talisman.

“Dis here is Marse Tom’s left hind foot of a rabbit kilt in a graveyard in de dark of de moon,” he announced. “But take de secret myst’ry of de hist’ry of dis here foot: it wus in Marse Tom’s own house when all dat rousement touck place an’ busted up Miss Virginia’s party. An’ I had dis foot in my own coat pocket on my own pussonal self when Cap’n Kerley busted my head wid dat bat an’ I mighty nigh shot his snout off wid my pistol!”

Mustard Prophet reached up and tenderly caressed a bandage upon his wounded head.

“Naw, suh,” he sighed. “’Tain’t resomble to me dat dis foot is still got de authority. I’ll keep it, but I don’t never trust it no more. Mr. On-lucky Foot, I axes you good-by!”

He solemnly placed his thick lips upon the cushiony bottom of the rabbit’s foot, and kissed it farewell.

In Gaitskill’s stable in Tickfall, an ideal playhouse for two boys, Orren Randolph Gaitskill and Little Bit had formed a joint ownership over eleven interesting objects: One baseball bat which had “busted a nigger’s head,” and ten pistol bullets which had been extracted from the walls in the Gaitskill home. At frequent intervals an argument started between them as to which of the ten bullets had wounded Captain Kerley Kerlerac in the face.

“Ef I knowed which one it wus, I’d shore tote it roun’ wid me fer luck,” Little Bit said.

“This bat is a lucky bat. It blooded Mustard’s head. But we can’t carry it around for luck,” Org said.

“Naw, suh, but we can kiss it fer luck,” Little Bit proclaimed.

“That’s right,” Org said. “You kiss one end and I’ll kiss the other.”

They solemnly held it up between them, and white lips and black lips caressed opposite ends of the big stick.

In the Gaitskill home, Captain Kerley Kerlerac entered and asked for Virginia. This was his tenth call since the night of the dinner ten days before. But now, for the first time, the bandage was removed from his face.

A long red scar marked the face from the point of the chin to the lobe of the ear.

For the first time Virginia saw that mark which he would carry to his grave. Kerlerac noticed that look of distress, but he had a little question which he often asked, and it always had the effect of diverting her mind from anything, however important, to something which was vastly more important.

“Do you love me as much as ever?” he asked quietly.

But the girl could not take her eyes from the long red scar. Her chin quivered with emotion and her lips drooped with the pain of the thought of that night of comedy when he had to suffer this wound.

“Stoop over and I’ll tell you,” she whispered.

He bent his head to hear the whisper from her fragrant lips.

She put both arms around his neck and kissed the scar upon his cheek.