Two Sorry Sons of Sorrow.
I
“ALL DE WORL’ AM SAD AN’ DREARY.”
Mustard Prophet, overseer of the Nigger-Heel plantation, sat on a box under a horse-shed in the rear of the Gaitskill store.
The gathering dusk of the October evening lent beauty to his sordid surroundings, and Mustard sweetened the scene by music. His thick lips caressed the silver mouthpiece of a cornet, and his bellows-like lungs sent forth strains which made all Tickfall listen:
“All de worl’ am sad an’ dreary, eb’rywhar I roam—”
Wherever music is there the negroes are gathered together. In a moment Pap Curtain entered the lot.
He was welcome because he carried a trombone.
“How come you toot sich sad toons, Mustard?” Pap inquired as he took his own musical instrument out of a dirty green bag.
“Ain’t us all sons of sorrer, Pap?” Mustard demanded in an argumentative tone. “Fo’ hundred bales of cotton raised on de Nigger-Heel plantation by me—an’ how much does me an’ Marse Tom git fer it? Jes’ perzackly nothin’ an’ not no more.”
“De white folks is argufyin’ ’bout a buy-a-bale move,” Pap began.
“Huh,” Mustard snorted. “Me an’ Marse Tom is argufyin’ ’bout a sell-a-bale move. I come to town to cornverse him ’bout dat.”
Pap’s trombone was ready, and the conversation ended with the lively strains of a duet, the refrain of which was: “De nigger hoes de cotton an’ cawn, but de white man gits de money.”
At the far end of the town a black saddle-horse emerged from the shadows of the swamp road and sailed up the sandy street with a motion as steady and rhythmical as the flight of a bird.
Balanced on the pommel of his saddle, the rider held a heavy canvas bag filled with gold and silver coins, but so easy was the gait of that superb horse that not a coin rattled. From long habit the animal stopped in front of the Tickfall bank.
The rider dismounted and walked to the door, feeling in his pocket for his keys.
Failing to find his keys, he set the bag of money on the steps and began a search of his clothes, but without success. After a moment’s thought he remounted his horse and rode down the street to his store.
The closing hour was six o’clock, and as it was nearly an hour later than that, he found the store also locked. But he stopped at the home of one of his clerks and secured a key.
Entering the building, he opened a small iron safe in the office situated in the middle of the store, placed the bag of money within, and gave the combination-knob a few quick turns.
Then hearing the lively duet in the rear of the store, he passed out into the lot. The duet came to a quick close.
“Howdy, Marse Tom?” the negroes exclaimed in concert. Then Mustard Prophet added, “I been waitin’ fer you all dis Saddy atternoon.”
“I knew it was you, Mustard,” Gaitskill grinned. “I’ve been hearing the sound of that old cornet twenty years, and I’d recognize it in China. What’s aching now?”
“Marse Tom, ain’t dese here hard times? Ain’t money skeercer dan snow in a hot biscuit-pan?”
“Just so,” Gaitskill said. “I’ve been out collecting to-day, and I know.”
“I reckin you an’ me will hab to keep on trustin’ de Lawd, Marse Tom—yes, suh, as de old Injun useter say, trus’ de good Lawd an’ keep our cotton dry.”
“What did you want to see me about?” Gaitskill asked.
“Look at dese clothes, Marse Tom!” Mustard answered earnestly. “Look at dese here empty pockets! Ain’t dey no way to sell our cotton? Don’t I git no loose change fer my year’s hard wuck?”
“Trust the good Lord!” Gaitskill grinned mockingly.
“I’m is trus’ de good Lawd, Marse Tom, but dat ain’t git me nothin’. An’ I’m jes’ ’bleeged to tell you, Marse Tom, dat while I still trus’ de Lawd I’s lookin’ to you fer some good clothes an’ some money.”
“Put not your trust in princes,” Gaitskill said with solemn mockery. “Trust the Lord!”
The negro fumbled at the keys of his cornet and sighed.
Gaitskill watched him with twinkling eyes. He was the best plow hand, the best hoe hand, the best negro overseer in Louisiana, and for twenty years had been in charge of Gaitskill’s famous Nigger-Heel plantation.
Simple, confiding, good-natured, trustworthy, industrious, Gaitskill was very fond of him and would do anything in reason for him. He loved to point him out to his friends as the negro whose hard work had made the Nigger-Heel one of the show-places among the plantations of the state.
“We’ll talk about it to-morrow, Mustard,” Gaitskill proposed. “What are you going to do to-night?”
“Hopey’s lookin’ fer me up to yo’ house, Marse Tom,” Mustard declared, all his gloom gone. “I ain’t saw dat wife of mine sence all dis here war trouble come on me.”
“I want you to sleep in this store to-night,” Gaitskill said. “Pile up some of the empty oat-sacks in the rear of the store and make a bed.”
“Yes, suh. I’ll take keer of eve’ything. You knows me, Marse Tom. Gimme de key!”
Gaitskill passed over the door-key and the negro followed him through the store to his horse.
“Marse Tom,” he said, as Gaitskill was mounting his horse, “’bout dis here war in Yurope; I don’t see no signs of no war in Yurope. Now, I figgers it out dis way: de Yanks up Nawf is done bought up all de newspapers an’ dey’s skeerin’ us wid all dis war-talk so dey kin run de price of cotton down an’ all us pore niggers——”
“Aw, shut up!” Gaitskill said.
Mustard watched the horseman until the dust and dark swallowed him up far down the street. Then he turned back into the store with a grin:
“Dat white man ain’t onsottlin’ his mind ’bout no war. He owns a bank!”
Mustard locked the front door, shutting himself in, then passed through the rear door into the lot where Pap Curtain was still waiting for him.
“Pap,” Mustard began, “does you know how come a nigger wucks wid his hands, while the white man figgers and counts his money?”
“Naw.”
“Well, suh, hit happened this way: A nigger, a Injun, an’ a white man wus playin’ seben-up under de shade of a tree. De good Lawd dropped down a box of tools right close to whar dey wus settin’, an’ all of ’em hopped up to git whut wus comin’ to ’em. De nigger wus hoggish an’ he grabbed de bigges’ things, an’ he got a shovel, a hoe, an’ a spade. De Injun, he had to hab his’n, so he grabbed de bow ’n’ arrer. Dar warn’t nothin’ lef’ fer de white man but a pen, so de white man, he figgers!”
“Yes, suh, dat’s whut de good Book say. But I’s heerd tell it diffunt.”
“How’s dat?” Mustard asked.
“De good Lawd made a nigger, a white man, an’ a Injun outen good clean mud. Atter de dirt had dried real good, He fotch ’em befo’ de big white jedgment seat.
“He say to de white man: ’Whut you gwine do?’ De white man specify: ‘I’s gwine be a merchant.’ Den He say to de Injun: ‘Whut you gwine do?’ De Injun spoke Him back: ‘I’se gwine hunt and fish.’
“Den He say to de nigger: ‘What you gwine do, cullud pusson?’ De nigger, he claw his head an’ ’spon’: ‘Dunno, boss. I reckin I’ll jes’ foller atter de boys. Mebbe dar’ll be cold vittles lef’ over fer me!’”
“Dat’s shore a true sayin’, Pap,” Mustard grinned. “An’ dat reminds my mind. Marse Tom didn’t say nothin’ ’bout me gittin’ my supper nowhar.”
“White folks cain’t turn a dog in a meat-house or a nigger in a sto’-house an’ especk him to starve to death,” Pap suggested.
“An’ of co’se, white folks cain’t be mad ef de dog or de nigger gives a invite to his frien’,” Mustard grinned. “Come in, Pap, less git somepin to eat!”
In the rear of the store they switched on an electric light, set out an empty box to serve for a table, and began a search for food. There was plenty of it, and they helped themselves and each other with extravagant liberality.
For a long time utterance was impeded by food, but at last Pap Curtain managed to articulate a query:
“Mustard, wid all dis grub in dis ration-house, how come ole Miss Mildred Gaitskill is so skinny an’ Marse Tom ain’t no fatter dan he wus when we fust knowed him fawty year ago?”
“Fattenin’ hogs ain’t in luck,” Mustard told him philosophically. “When you gits all you wants to eat, look out for de butcher! Escusin’ dat, white folks ain’t studyin’ ’bout somepin to eat. Dey studies money.”
“Huh,” Pap sighed, as he rubbed his stomach, then rose and walked around the store to make room for more food. “I wouldn’t mind a invite to hold dis fer a constant job—plenty of steady sleep an’ reg’lar rations.”
“I’s got to whar I kin still chaw, but I cain’t swaller much mo’,” Mustard lamented. “Less hunt somepin kinder loose an’ little to eat, so it’ll fill up de cracks inside us!”
The hours passed.
At last Mustard leaned back in his chair. His stomach was gorged, his head blood-flushed until his temples throbbed like drums. He kicked over the box which had served as a table, thus dumping the cans and bottles and other empty receptacles into a corner of the store and rose to his feet.
“Whar is de seegaws in dis sto’?” Pap inquired sleepily.
“I’ll git ’em,” Mustard said.
Selecting the largest cigars in stock, he wandered sleepily back to Pap Curtain. The clock in the court-house steeple tolled the hour. Mustard counted.
“Twelve!” he exclaimed. “Here we been eatin’ five hours an’ to-morrer is de secont day! Git outen dis sto’, Pap Curtain!”
Pap rose, and Mustard followed him to the rear door and shut him out.
Then, tossing his cigar aside, Mustard piled an armload of sacks in the corner, snapped off the electric light, and sprawled down upon his pallet, sinking instantly into a slumber like the lethargy of the gorged boa constrictor, or the inertia of the hibernating bear.
He was a sound sleeper.
II
THE LONE WOLF.
Slatey the Skull was a gentleman of leisure and perverted education; he was also a nitroglycerin expert, making a specialty of the application of this sovereign explosive to burglar-proof safes.
He was a child of the congested cities, loving the noise and clatter of their streets, the whir of machinery, the hum and hustle of their myriad life. But tuberculosis clutched at his panting, crumbling lungs with the pitiless fingers of death, and the ravages of the disease had changed a naturally ruddy countenance into the emaciated, soapstone-colored face which gave him the name among his fellows.
Under sentence of death, imposed, not by the law of the land which he defied, but by the law of life which defied him, he had wandered from the city to the deep woods and sparsely populated villages of the South as a wild goat leaves its fellows and crawls into some desolate mountain cave to languish and die alone.
Despairing of his own life, indifferent to the lives of others, he was a lone wolf, perilous, predaceous, as quick to strike and as deadly as a viper. His admiring fellows said of him that he could “smell money.”
Slipping like a shadow from the log-train which stopped for water at Tickfall shortly after midnight, he wandered up the crooked, silent, deserted streets toward the business portion of the village.
Pausing before the door of the Gaitskill store, his thin, flexible nostrils quivered like a rabbit’s nose. Flattening himself against the door like the wraith of a man, his keen eyes searched the streets, his acutely sensitive ears listened intently.
Then he turned, and with an ease like the magic of a sleight-of-hand performer, he opened the door and entered the store.
“I smell a nigger,” he muttered with a curse, as the stale odor of cigar smoke racked his frail body with noiseless coughing.
Leaving the front door unlocked, he walked noiselessly down the avenue between the counters to open the door in the rear. There he found Mustard Prophet sleeping on a pile of sacks, invisible to the eye, but easily vizualized by the trained mind of the Skull as he listened to Mustard’s stertorous breathing.
“A nigger,” he racked with his noiseless cough, “stuffed like a fat woman’s stocking, sleeping like a stiff!”
He walked back to the little office partitioned off in the middle of the store. His frail fingers fumbled with the combination knob of the safe for a moment, then caressed its top and sides.
“Forty years old,” he sighed, “and made of pot-metal. If I was not so weak, I’d turn it over and kick a hole in the bottom of it with my sore toe. As it is, I’ll have to work with this soup and cough like an alligator for a week with its fumes in my lungs.”
Ten minutes later the door of the safe swung crazily open, hanging upon a half-broken hinge.
The bony arm and hand of the Skull explored the contents. His fingers grasped the top of the coarse bag which Colonel Gaitskill had placed there a few hours before, and he lifted it out.
“No further seek its contents to disclose or draw its dollars from their frail abode,” the Skull parodied. “The simp put it all in one sack for me and tied the top with a rawhide string.”
His fingers fumbled the contents of the sack through the thick cloth.
“Gosh!” he sighed. “Gold and silver and a little dirty paper money—heavy as pig-iron—and I’m too weak to carry an empty pill-box across the street to a homeopathic doctor.”
Nevertheless, he took the bag with him as he started to leave. At the rear door, he paused at the pallet where Mustard lay sprawled out and a sardonic smile distorted his skull-like face.
“Behold the guardian of this gold!” he muttered. “Strange the South has been the fall guy for this sort of servant ever since the South began. Well, Cæsar had his Brutus, and every colonel has his coon!”
Then he stepped out into the lot and closed the door behind him.
There was the crack of a pistol, and a bullet plugged into the door-jamb.
“You missed, friend!” the Skull called tauntingly. “I had my sharp edge turned toward you!”
The night prowler in the Southern village seeking spoils is exposed to no danger by the night watchman sleeping sweetly on a soft stone step. The yeggman dreads the fox-hunters.
They leave town at sundown accompanied by friends, followed by dogs, comforted by the contents of sundry jugs. They are kept keyed up to alert wakefulness by the excitement of the chase and return only when the jugs are empty.
It was a party of fox-hunters, headed by Sheriff Flournoy, with whom Slatey the Skull had now to deal. Passing through the town on their return from the hunt they had heard the dull explosion in the store and had made an investigation. They were now in ambush, waiting for the appearance of the safe-blower.
It was Flournoy’s pistol which had roused the Skull to his danger.
But the Skull was not disturbed. Shifting his bag of money so that he carried it on his left arm as a woman carries a bundle, he slipped his automatic from his pocket.
Crouching low in the darkness and walking with the noiseless tread of a cat within ten feet of Flournoy, he passed unobserved by the sheriff out of the lot into the alley and on to the front of the store. The bullets zipped around him as he ran out of the alley toward the middle of the street, but the Skull’s first shot was upward at the electric street light which went out, leaving him sheltered by almost total darkness.
Running down the alley, Flournoy fired into that circle of darkness at a venture.
The answer of the Skull’s gun was instantaneous. The sheriff felt a jar which almost paralyzed his right arm. Making an investigation he uttered a low exclamation of wonder and admiration: The Skull’s bullet had struck and destroyed the sheriff’s weapon.
In the mean time the rest of the fox-hunters had been spreading out, trailing along the street in front of the store. In a moment half a dozen pistols began to shoot and the Skull was engaged in the battle of his life.
In the Louisiana villages promiscuous shooting upon the street at night is a fire-alarm. Roused by such shooting, men quickly slip on their clothes, seize their own firearms, and run down the street toward the first alarm, firing into the air as they run, thus rousing the whole town.
All over Tickfall, men heard what they thought was a fire-signal from the business section of the village. Fearful of losing their stores and offices, they ran toward the fray, shouting and shooting, until Tickfall sounded like a battle with a thousand men engaged.
“The beggars are coming to town,” Slatey the Skull quoted with a skinny smile. “I’ll wait until the mob arrives, then slip through the crowd in the dark.”
But alas, the Skull was not acquainted with Sheriff Flournoy.
Adopting the old Indian trick of lying flat on the ground, thus throwing the object he was approaching against the sky so that he could see it, the sheriff with bones like an ox and a mouth as grim and cruel as a bear-trap was slowly crawling toward the sardonic creature of skin and bones, as frail and delicate as a girl, who sat sedately beside the stolen money-bag.
Suddenly Slatey screamed like a wildcat and sprang to his feet.
Wrestling with his feeble strength, shooting wildly, biting, clawing, he struggled in the bear-like hug of the giant sheriff. Then something snapped inside the Skull’s body and with a frightened “Ah!” he sank limply into the hands of his captor.
At that moment the street was filled with armed men, white and black, looking for the conflagration. Explanations flew from lip to lip. Some one entered the Gaitskill store and turned on the lights.
Then Sheriff Flournoy entered carrying Slatey the Skull.
“Is he dead?” the crowd asked in one breath.
“I think not,” the sheriff said. “I did not shoot.”
“Gib him a leetle dram, Mister Johnnie,” Pap Curtain spoke up.
“Go over to my office and get my flask, Pap,” the sheriff commanded, as he tossed Curtain his office keys, “You’ll find it on my desk.”
Pap Curtain started after that flask at full speed. In the middle of the street, under the broken electric light, his foot struck a coarse canvas bag, he stumbled, fell headlong, butted a hitching post with a resounding whack and stayed right there.
Ten minutes later the crowd found him, unconscious, clutching the office keys in his cold hand.
One negro, a belated arrival, saw Pap Curtain fall.
He ran to Pap’s rescue, but never arrived. His foot also struck that bag. Stooping, he picked it up, felt of its contents, recognized the familiar rattle of coins, and promptly departed, taking that bag with him lest some other person fall over it and get hurt.
The sheriff had no sooner sent Pap Curtain after a flask than several were produced and tendered. The liquor, poured down the throat of Slatey, started a shudderlike cough and a bloody spume issued from the wounded man’s mouth. Then he spoke splutteringly:
“You broke a rib and caved it through the only good lung I have, Mr. Officer. I guess you win.”
“Where’s the money?” Flournoy demanded.
“I—ah—” A shuddering, racking cough stopped all speech and the pitiful creature struggled as if he were never to breathe again. At last he spoke:
“I’m suffering very much. Get a doctor—”
“Where’s the money?” several men asked in a chorus.
“That’s for you to find out,” the Skull answered, with a momentary flash of his old lawless spirit. Then weakly: “Get a doctor!”
“Where’s the money?” Colonel Gaitskill asked, bending over Slatey.
“Where’s the sawbones, Santa Claus?” Slatey mocked, coughing little flecks of blood off his lips.
“Get a doctor!” Gaitskill commanded sharply, glaring at the crowd.
Dr. Shuttle stepped forth, producing, with an important air, a pocket medical case containing a hypodermic needle and several vials of medicine.
Dr. Shuttle was young and very ambitious. He quickly made a hypodermic injection into the Skull’s side. It eased the criminal’s pain. In fact he has never suffered since. In short, he died.
“Where’s the money?” the sheriff demanded again, shaking the lifeless form.
The Skull’s mouth drooped open in a grotesque imitation of a laugh. Slatey had nothing more to say.
“Thunderation!” the sheriff exclaimed in a mighty voice. “Hunt around for that money-bag. This fellow did not get away with it.”
Oil lanterns were quickly procured and the crowd searched the street, the alley, the lot in the rear and the neighboring places. They discovered nothing but the limp form of Pap Curtain.
While the crowd was gathering around Curtain, from inside the store a mighty shout arose:
“Here’s the other one, Flournoy!”
The crowd plunged into the store, surged to the rear and gathered in a tight circle around the prostrate form of Mustard Prophet.
He was still asleep!
III
THE SLEEPER WAKES.
A number of eager feet kicked Mustard Prophet into wakefulness.
As many willing hands assisted him to his feet. He stood among them, glaring owlishly, blinded by the light, confused by the noise, frightened by the unaccountable presence of most of the male inhabitants of Tickfall.
“’Scuse me, white folks,” he began. “I shore is befuddled-up by all dis here gwines-on. Marse Tom say fer me not to let nobody in dis here sto’-house.”
“Where’s that money?” a voice demanded.
“Which?” Mustard asked.
“Where’s that money you and the white man got?”
“I ain’t got no money, white folks,” Mustard declared. “You-all ax Marse Tom! An’ Marse Tom say me not to let nobody in dis sto’—”
“Aw, come off!” another voice exclaimed. “You ain’t been sleeping through all this racket. Tell us where the bag of money is!”
“Befo’ Gawd, white folks!” Mustard replied. “I ain’t got no bag of nothin’.”
Then Mustard saw Colonel Gaitskill. “Bless gracious, Marse Tom!” he pleaded. “Come here and fotch me away from dese pesticatin’ white gemmans. Dey examinates me ’bout money like I done sold all de Nigger-Heel cotton ’thout turnin’ in de tickets—”
Colonel Gaitskill whispered to Flournoy.
“Put him in jail, John, and after the crowd disperses, we’ll slip around there and talk to him.”
Flournoy promptly acted upon this suggestion, and on the way picked up Pap Curtain, now restored to consciousness—Dr. Shuttle had had better luck with Pap—and incarcerated them both.
The crowd followed and watched the sheriff until he locked the two negroes behind the bars.
“Nothing more doing to-night, friends,” he announced in his drawly voice. “We’ll all go to bed and discuss the matter to-morrow. Good-night.”
He walked down the street toward his home. The crowd gathered in little groups, talked for a few minutes and dissolved.
Colonel Gaitskill returned to the store, issued orders to his clerks concerning the disposition of the Skull’s body, and went home.
Just at daybreak Sunday morning, Gaitskill and Flournoy, after another fruitless search for the lost money, entered the jail.
They found Mustard and Pap Curtain sitting side by side, steeped in deepest gloom. Gaitskill became the spokesman:
“Where were you all last night, Mustard?”
“I wus in de sto’-house, Marse Tom. I didn’t leave dat place a minute till de white folks tuck me to jail.”
“What did you do after I left?”
“At de fust offstartin’, I et.”
“What did you eat?” Gaitskill asked, wondering what food could produce slumber as profound as Mustard seemed to have experienced.
“I et two cans of sawdines, an’ a can of devilish ham, an’ a hunk of cheese.”
“What else?”
“I et some crackers an’ some beelony sausage, an’ two awanges, an’ fo’ bananers, an’ a box of candy.”
“What else?”
“Nothin’ else, Marse Tom. Of co’se, I kinder nibbled aroun’ a little. I foun’ some raisins an’ a diffunt kind of cheese whut smelt like somepin dead to me, an’ some cakes wid white icin’ on de top, an’ a can of oystyers.”
“Did you get enough to satisfy your appetite?”
“Satisfy—oh, yes, suh, I felt powerful well fed.”
The sheriff broke into a loud laugh.
“No use to cackle, Mister Johnnie. I’s tellin’ de trufe. I shore had a plenty.”
“What did you do next?” Gaitskill inquired.
“I fotch out one of dem long Perique seegaws an’ lit up.”
Both white men had begun to laugh. Mustard knew there was no harm coming to a negro from white men with the giggles. So he dismissed his fears and became expansive in his remarks:
“Dem Perique seegaw stogies ain’t as good as dey looks, Marse Tom. No man ain’t got a sucker in his mouf strong enough to make ’em draw, an’ when dey does draw, no man ain’t got no cornstitution powerful enough to stan’ de smoke.”
“What did you do next, Mustard?”
“I laid down on dem oat-sacks an’ went to sleep.”
Gaitskill had known Mustard so long that he could read the negro’s mind like a book. Although no question had been asked about the robbery, he was sure that Mustard had nothing to do with it. Then he began to explain to Mustard:
“Somebody robbed my store last night, Mustard.”
“Lawdymussy, Marse Tom! Bad luck is shore kotch you by de forelock. I’s powerful sorry to hear dem bad news.”
“The man who blew open the safe was killed in a fight, but we can’t find the bag of money,” Gaitskill continued.
“Dar now!” Mustard declared with unction. “Mo’ bad luck! It ’pears like it’s jes’ sorrer piled on top of sorrer in dis here grief-strucken-down worl’. I’s shore sorry, Marse Tom—”
“The reason I wanted you to sleep in that store was to guard that safe.”
“Hol’ on dar, Marse Tom,” Mustard said, coming quickly to his own defense. “You didn’t say me no words ’bout dat safe. All you said wus: ‘I want you to sleep in dis sto’ to-night.’ Ain’t dat so?”
“Yes.”
“Well, suh, I done it. I done it fur a fack. I done jes’ whut you tole me. I sleeped in de sto’.”
“That’s a fact,” Flournoy chuckled, imitating the negro’s mode of speech: “Dat’s whut he done!”
“I’se sorry, Marse Tom,” Mustard said, “but I ain’t to blame.”
Sheriff Flournoy looked at his watch.
“Look here, Tom,” he said. “If we are going to find the money, we’d better let this sorry son of sorrow skedaddle. He ain’t got it.”
Mustard showed that he favored the sheriff’s suggestion by rising to his feet with alacrity.
“Mister Sheriff Johnnie—” Pap Curtain, who had been a silent listener, began plaintively.
“Shut up, Pap,” the sheriff interrupted. “You can come, too. I can’t keep a nigger in jail for falling down and bumping his head.”
The four walked out of the jail door together. At the door Mustard asked:
“Marse Tom, please, suh, dem white gemmans pestered me so stout las’ night dat I couldn’t git my hat an’ my cawnet-hawn befo’ dey tuck me to jail. Will you open de sto’ so I kin git ’em?”
Consenting to this request, Gaitskill opened the door, and said:
“Go in and get them, Mustard.”
A minute later, within the store, there was a loud whoop and a wailing cry:
“Oo-oo-ee! Oh, my blessid gracious goodness! He’p, Marse Tom, fer Gawd’s sake!”
The two white men ran into the store and found Prophet down upon his knees, hiding the horror before him by shielding his eyes with his hands, which was the still form of Slatey the Skull outstretched upon a cooling-board in the office.
Mustard had found his hat near his pallet of oat-sacks, but his beloved cornet was on top of a desk in the office.
“Get up, Mustard,” Gaitskill commanded, striking him with his foot. “This is the man who blew open the safe.”
The big-hearted, giant-bodied sheriff gazed upon the criminal, then stepped over and felt the emaciated hands and arms.
“He was as frail as a girl, Tom,” he said, with a note of pity in his voice. “But he fought like a snake. I simply had to crush him.”
“Oh, lawdymussy, take me away from dis here terr’ble place!” Mustard bawled, kneeling before the broken office safe as before an altar.
Handing the negro his cornet, Gaitskill made him rise, and followed him to the door, where Pap Curtain stood pop-eyed and trembling.
“Marse Tom,” Mustard quavered, “I’s gwine leave dis land of sorrer. I ain’t never comin’ back no mo’ escusin’ you come atter me an’ fotch me back.”
“Me, too!” Pap Curtain piped.
The two white men watched the progress of the two negroes as they hastened down the street.
“Mustard didn’t have a thing to do with it,” Flournoy said.
Gaitskill nodded his assent.
IV
THE CONQUEST OF KERLERAC
“Marse Tom say I warn’t to blame and Sheriff Flournoy turned me loose. But dem white gemmans whut kicked me an’ blimblammed me in de sto’house las’ night ain’t say nothin’. Mebbe dey’s gwine hang me yit. I dunno. I ain’t gwine be aroun’ handy till dey gits deir minds sottled dat they ain’t,” Mustard Prophet declared.
“Ef dey finds out dat you and me wus bofe in dat house stuffin’ ourse’ves wid vittles, dey’ll take a notion dat dey am,” Pap Curtain asserted.
“I’s done heerd de call of de migrashun nigger, Pap,” Mustard said mournfully.
“Go wid me to my cabin an’ lemme git my trombone-hawn,” Pap replied. “Den I’ll mosey wid you.”
The two spent the day under the willows on the banks of the Dorfoche Bayou, lamenting their luck.
“Pap,” Mustard said, “de good Book say dat troubles is seasoning. Pussimmons ain’t good till dey’s fros’-bit. But it ’pears to me like I done had my sheer of sorrer.”
“Me, too,” Pap agreed. “Now I argufies dat de only fitten occupation for a sorrowful man is fishin’. Less go ketch some grasshoppers and see kin we land a few trouts.”
“All right,” Mustard said. “But I favors fishin’ to’rds de railroad bridge, because we’s gwine ketch de souf-boun’ freight.”
Just at dark, the whistle of the freight train screeched for the Dorfoche crossing. Mustard and Pap tossed their poles into the middle of the stream and ten minutes later were aboard an empty freight car, nursing their musical instruments in their laps, bound for an unknown destination.
The fact that the side door of the car which they had caught was open would have published to an experienced traveler that that particular car was not going very far.
When Mustard and Pap woke up, they thought at first that the train had stopped.
Then peeping out cautiously, they ascertained that the engine had sidetracked their car and gone on. Finding themselves in the middle of an immense sugar plantation, they climbed on top of the car to reconnoiter.
Their first familiar sight was a broad, muddy river.
“Dar now!” Pap exulted. “Dat’s ole Massasap. Home’s up de ribber.”
“I bet dis here plantation ain’t fur from some town,” Mustard reasoned. “Less hoof it up de river an’ see kin we find some place whut ain’t so lonesome.”
Picking up their musical instruments, they walked to the levee and turned upstream.
“I smells Tickfall,” Mustard muttered, sniffing the air. “’Tain’t no matter how fur it is, dis river goes past it.”
“I hopes Tickfall ain’t smellin’ us,” Pap declared. “I’s got it proned into me dat we made a good riddunce outen dat place.”
Two miles up the levee and around a bend in the river, they came to a little town squatting like a bullfrog under the protection levee, its gutters running constantly with the seepage water from the dike, its few houses clothed in river fog and standing on high foundations like stilts, the paint upon them cracking and their eaves dripping with moisture.
“Dis here town looks like a spindle-shanked crane,” Mustard declared in disgust. “Dem legs under dem houses is shore fixed fer wadin’.”
Then a prominent building came into view, and Pap Curtain stopped like a man turned to stone.
“I knows dis here town,” Pap declared. “Dey calls it Kerlerac.”
“How fur from Tickfall?” Mustard inquired.
“Thuty mile.”
“Come on, den. Less meet deir ’quaintance.”
“Naw, suh!” Pap protested. “You see dat high buildin’ over dar? Two nigger womans helt me up in front of dat Red El’phunt s’loon an’ robbed me of a dollar an’ fo’ bits. One of ’em helt a razor at my neck, an’ de yuther tuck my loose change.”
“Dat don’t make no diffunce,” argued Mustard. “Dey ain’t dar now.”
“I reckin not!” Pap said positively. “I kotch ’em when dey wusn’t lookin’ and helt ’em by deir hair and bumped deir heads togedder! An’ what you reckin dem womans done? Dey paid a white lawyer my own good money to git me in a lawsuit wid de cote-house, an’ dey put me in de chain-gang fer six mont’s.”
“Hear dat, now!” Mustard exclaimed. “Bad luck!”
“Shore wus. But I didn’t stay dar no time. I lef’ dat chain-gang in fo’ days. Dat’s how come I ain’t so glad to see dis town agin,” Pap said. Then after a moment’s thought, he suggested: “I tells you how to do, Mustard. You take yo’ cawnet-hawn an’ go out an’ pick de town.”
“Pick it?”
“Stop on all de cornders, play ’em a toon, den pass de hat,” Pap explained. “I’ll set down here an’ res’ my mind till you gits a little money, an’ in de nex’ town we goes to I’ll do de pickin’.”
So Mustard walked up the levee toward the town alone.
In the Red Elephant saloon, he said to the bartender:
“Mister, dese here white genmans need wakin’ up dis mawnin’. Lemme toot a toon or two?”
“Crack away, nigger.”
A few experimental strains issued from the cornet, followed by a high, piercing note; then Mustard started the music of a song everywhere dear to the heart of the Mississippi River negro:
Oh, honey, when you hear dat roan mule whicker;
When you see Mr. Sun turnin’ pale an’ gittin’ sicker
Den it’s time fer to handle dis job a little quicker
Ef you wanter git a smell of de boss-man’s jug of licker.
Git up an’ move aroun’! Set dem han’s to swingin’
Befo’ de boss-man comes aroun’ a dangin’ an’ a dingin’.
Git up an’ shout aloud! Let de white folks hear you singin’—
Hey! O—Hi—O! Hear dem voices ringin’!
All the morning in various sections of the town Pap Curtain, hiding under the levee, could hear the strains of Mustard’s cornet.
Just at noon, Mustard came back, walking slowly, his good-natured face burdened with grief and disappointment, his defeat and dejection revealed even by the dragging of his ponderous feet.
“Whut ails you, Mustard?” Pap inquired solicitously.
“I’m a son of sorrer, Pap,” Mustard wailed. “Nobody but de good Marster kin ’preciate what bad luck I’s had.”
“Whut come to pass?” Pap inquired with interest.
“At de fust offstartin’ I blowed my hawn in de Red El’phant till de white folks gimme a dollar, all in nickles and dimes. Den a white man follered me out when I lef’ an’ tole me ef I would loant him dat money he would show me how to make it disappear.
“Of co’se, I loant it to him, an’ he put it in his pocket an’ said escuse him a minute, an’ he went away an’ I ain’t seed dat white man sence dat time.”
Pap Curtain gazed at Mustard with an expression of mingled pity and disgust. Mustard continued his tale of woe:
“Two white kunnels gimme fo’ bits apiece to play Dixie fer ’em. I had dat money changed over to a paper dollar so it wouldn’t roll away like de yuther dollar done. Den anodder white man come along an’ say ef I gib him dat paper dollar he’d show me how to double it.
“Of co’se, I needed it doubled right quick because I wus already behine one dollar, so I loant it to him to double it. He jes’ folded it over one time; den he shet one eye at me an’ stuck my dollar down in his pocket.”
“Didn’t you ax him to give it back?” Curtain asked.
“Naw, suh, dat was a powerful brave-lookin’ man an’ he acted like he mought ’a’ fought a sawmill ef he wus peeved up.”
“Mustard, you is a plum’, nachel-bawn, stark-naked fool,” Pap informed him.
“I agrees wid dem sentiments,” Mustard said sorrowfully. “Lawdy, my foots shore hurts me scandalous. Lemme set down.”
“Ain’t you got no money a-tall?” Pap inquired peevishly.
“Naw,” Mustard informed him.
“Is you had anything to eat?”
“Naw,” Mustard lamented. “An’ I’s so hungry I could eat a houn’-dog biled in soap grease.”
The two sat for a moment, looking out at the river. Then Mustard suggested:
“You go out an’ try ’em a few toons, Pap. I axed eve’ybody I met ef dey knowed a nigger named you, an’ dey said dey didn’t.”
V
TROUBLE’S TWIN.
All the afternoon Pap Curtain played trombone solos on the streets of Kerlerac while Mustard Prophet rested his feet.
About four o’clock Mustard and Pap slipped into a negro eating-house and ordered food.
“Whar you cullud pussons come from?” Smart Durret, the negro restaurant keeper, inquired as his patrons consumed large quantities of fried catfish.
“We stays at Tickfall,” Mustard answered.
“When did you-alls arrive down?”
“We come dis mawnin’,” Pap responded.
At this point another occupant of the restaurant rose from a table in one corner of the room, gesticulated mysteriously and forcibly to Smart Durret and went out of a rear door into the kitchen. The mulatto proprietor followed.
“Don’t ax so many questions, Smart,” was the prompt advice of the little negro to the mulatto. “I wucks fer Sheriff Ulloa, an’ I heard tell dis mawnin’ dat somebody robbed a sto’ in Tickfall an’ dey’s offered a hunderd-dollar reward-bill fer who done it.”
Smart Durret’s mud-colored eyes opened wide.
“Dat sto’ was robbed Saddy night,” the little negro continued. “Dem two coons come to town dis mawnin’ early. Dey been takin’ turns hidin’ on de yuther side of de levee all day. Dem niggers is shore it.”
“Is you gwine tell de sheriff, Solly?” the mulatto asked.
“Naw,” Solly exclaimed in disgusted tones. “I figgers dat you an’ me kin kotch ’em out alone, arrest ’em ourse’ves an’ ’vide up de reward-bill even.”
“Dat’s de music!” Smart exclaimed, admiringly. “You keep track of ’em an’ you an’ me’ll git togedder on it to-night.”
Thus advised, Solly Saddler, amateur detective, shadowed Mustard Prophet and Pap Curtain all the afternoon and when darkness came was prepared to report their location to Smart Durret.
“Now, Solly,” Smart advised, “we ain’t got no permit to ’rest dese niggers accawdin’ to de law. So I argufies dat de best way to do is to git in a fight wid ’em, sen’ somebody fer de cornstable, an’ let him tote us all to jail. Den we kin esplain to de sheriff whut we knows, an’ he’ll let us out because you’re a frien’ of his’n.”
“Smart,” Solly exclaimed, “when yo’ mind goes off it kicks like a muzzle-loader. Dat plan’ll hit de bull’s-eye. But ef you ain’t got no objections, I’ll be de one whut goes atter de cornstable. Dem two coons looks powerful perilous to me.”
“All right,” Smart acquiesced reluctantly. “But don’t you lose no time gittin’ dat cornstable. I ’speck you better fetch de sheriff, too.”
They separated to meet an hour later in the Chicken-Wing saloon, a negro resort where Mustard and Pap were loudly advertising their presence by playing duets.
The plan of the two conspirators to start trouble was simple but effective.
Solly Saddler entered the place with a bucket of red paint and a broad paint-brush. Smart Durret came in with a large bottle filled with a foamy, milk-colored liquid—soap-suds.
The two avoided each other for a time, then they got together.
“Whut’s dat you got in dat bottle, Smart?” Solly inquired in a nigger-minstrel tone.
“Dis here is a new kind of cleaner fer clothes,” Smart answered. “It takes all de dirt spots, grease spots, fade spots, an’ paint spots offen clothes, suits, dresses, an’ sich like.”
“Dat stuff won’t conjure loose no paint spots,” Solly argued, flourishing the bucket of paint at Smart.
“I bet yer fo’ bits,” Smart answered promptly.
Then followed a heated discussion of the merits of the paint remover. The crowd slowly gathered around the disputants, and Solly gradually worked his way around until he stood directly in front of Mustard Prophet.
Setting the bucket of paint on the floor and stooping over it, he began to stir it with his brush while the argument waxed hotter and hotter. Then Solly arose, with the dripping paint-brush in his hand.
Then with a quick turn and flourish, he swiped the dripping paint-brush up and down the front of Mustard Prophet’s clothes.
“Now, nigger Durret,” Solly bawled dramatically, “lemme see you take de paint off dis cullud brudder’s coat!”
Mustard reeled backward to escape the paint, a guffaw of loud laughter swept around the circle, and Solly followed Mustard, still busy plying the brush.
Mustard was a sight.
Then Mustard got busy. Solly felt a hard hand on the back of his neck, lost his grip on the brush, and Mustard caught it.
Irresistibly, Mustard led the struggling negro back to the red paint, held him there as easily as a man can hold a wiggling fish suspended from a hook, and proceeded to paint him red, frescoing both the garments and the man within them.
Solly bawled and shrieked and struggled and bit, but Mustard did not release him until the bucket was exhausted of paint.
Solly, too, was a sight.
Then Smart Durret entered the fracas. Seizing his bottle of magic cleanser by the neck and manipulating it like a club, he struck it over the dome of Prophet’s head.
But the soapy neck of the bottle was slick and slipped from Durret’s hand, bounced from the armor-plated skull of Mustard Prophet like a rubber ball, and was smashed to fragments halfway across the room.
Pap Curtain, in his turn, came to the aid of his friend. Picking up the paint-bucket with a circular motion of his long arm, he brought it down upon the head of Smart Durret. The bucket did not bounce, but Durret did.
Deciding it was high time to go for the constable and the sheriff, Solly departed with expedition, deeply regretting that the State militia and the Federal army were not available in this hour of need.
But Smart and Solly had loyal friends, and in a moment Mustard and Pap stood with their backs to the wall, each in possession of a heavy chair, holding it like a lion-tamer to keep the crowd from rushing them.
Drawn by E. W. Kemble.
Mustard proceeded to paint him red.
“Don’t scrouge, niggers!” Mustard bawled, as he held his chair poised for battle. “I done kilt so many coons I can’t count ’em. A feather fell from a buzzard’s wing an’ hit me on de head when I wus little, which am a sign dat my path is crossed wid dead men. Come right on an’ git your’n!”
Then for a minute Mustard and Pap were the center of a whirling wheel of legs and arms and hands and heads; holding their chairs before them they charged through the ring like two angry bears. Men doubled up before them and went down and they took a side-swipe at the rest as they passed.
They had reached the door in safety and were just about to pass through when the door was blocked by the portly form of the town constable.
The combatants came to a full stop. The battle was ended.
“Dat’s dem, Mister Rogers!” Solly Saddler squealed, as he pointed out Pap and Mustard. “Dey wus peckin’ on me an’ Smart Durret.”
“You four bucks march along in front of me,” the officer announced briefly. “Go to jail.”
At the jail door Mustard stopped to make a plea which was ably seconded by the others.
“Please, boss, don’t put us togedder.”
“Naw,” Solly exclaimed earnestly. “Let me an’ Smart go upstairs. Lock us away from dem terr’ble mens!”
“Go upstairs, then,” Rogers said.
A minute later, Pap and Mustard stood together behind the bars.
“I done been in jail two times in two days,” Mustard mourned. “Sorrer’s done kotch me again.”
“Me, too,” Pap lamented. “Bad luck’s got me by de lef’ hind leg wid a downhill pull!”
“Same back at you, brudders!” a strange voice from the darkness in tragic tones. “I’s Trouble’s twin!”
Having no charge against the four negroes except disorderly conduct, the constable had merely separated the combatants, allowing each pair the freedom of the entire floor. Mustard and Pap had believed that they were alone upon this lower floor until the strange voice spoke.
Their hair stood up in superstitious fear, but the voice spoke again:
“Howdy, brudders!”
“Who dat talkin’ to hisse’f?” Mustard asked in frightened tones. “Whar is you at? Name yo’ name!”
“Dey calls me Mobile,” the stranger confessed, coming forward. Then he proposed in a whisper: “Less go in one of dese little cages an’ set an’ talk.”
“Naw,” Pap replied forcibly. “De wind might blow dat iron do’ shet. I likes de outside.”
So, instead, the three groped their way down the corridor and sat down on the window-sill, using the grating behind them as a rest for their backs.
“My name is Mustard Prophet.”
“I’s Pap Curtain.”
“Huh,” was the surprised grunt from Mobile.
“Which?” Pap and Mustard asked in duet.
“Whar you-alls from?” Mobile asked.
“Tickfall.”
There was a long silence.
“Whut dey got you in fer?” Mobile asked next.
“A nigger painted my clothes in de Chicken-Wing an’ I fit him to a finish,” Mustard chuckled. “Pap helped.”
“Oo-ee, brudders!” Mobile exclaimed mournfully. “I bet dey gives you ’bout fo’teen years fer dat. Dis is a mean town to niggers! I got to dis town on Sunday mawnin’, and got drunk, and got in a rookus in de Chicken-Wing, an’ dey put me in jail befo’ dinner-time an’ tuck all my money off me—an’ I had ’bout fifteen cents!”
“Dat’s too bad,” Mustard sighed, leaning back against the grating behind him. Then he sprang forward suddenly and exclaimed: “Looky here, Mobile! De bars on dis here winder is plum’ loose!”
“Suttinly,” Mobile whispered.
“How come?”
“I sawed on ’em all Sunday atternoon, an’ Sunday night, an’ all to-day, an’ a leetle bit to-night,” Mobile told him.
“You ain’t figgerin’ to git out, is you?” Mustard inquired innocently.
“Naw, son!” Mobile denied in tones which throbbed with disgust. “I jes’ wants to let in a leetle mo’ fresh air.”
“Us favors mo’ fresh air, too,” Pap snickered.
“I done got ’em sawed loose—mighty nigh,” Mobile said. “Dey’s sawed plum’ across on de sides an’ de bottom, but dey ain’t sawed on de top. You reckon us-all is got muscle enough to ketch holt dat gratin’ an’ bend her in or shove her out?”
“Shorely!” Mustard asserted eagerly. “I kin heft a bale of cotton an’ tote it up de gang-plank of a steamboat.”
The three stood up in the window with their feet resting on the sill.
They stooped and caught hold of the grating at the lower end, and leaning backward, they lifted up and in. Under that mighty strain, the iron grating attached to the masonry by four bars at the top slowly bent and left an opening underneath large enough to allow their bodies to pass through.
The three lost no time in climbing out. They had gone around to the front of the jail when Mustard stopped.
“Hol’ on dar, Mobile,” he muttered. “I done ferget my cawnet-hawn an’ lef’ it in de jail. I needs dat hawn.”
“Leave it be,” Mobile advised.
“I done fergot my trombone-hawn,” Pap added. “Go back an’ git ’em fer us, Mustard.”
“Naw,” Mobile protested. “I got plenty money. I’ll pay you fer ’em.”
“Naw,” Mustard rejoined vehemently. “Marse Tom gimme dat cawnet-hawn, an’ he’s powerful proud of it. He say he’d know de sound of dat cawnet in Chinee.”
Their argument ended right there, for suddenly from a window in the second story of the jail two voices screeched like a calliope:
“Murder-r! He’p! Come here, eve’ybody!”
Yells and whoops and screams and wails came from Solly and Smart who realized that Mustard and Pap had escaped and who saw the reward for their capture slipping away, leaving themselves in durance.
At the first screech, Rogers, the constable, who was sitting on a near-by door-step, ran to the jail and arrived just in time to empty his pistol at the fleeing forms of the three negroes as they passed under the last electric street light, and ran onto the protection levee at the river.
Then the constable hastened back to the jail and became the recipient of some surprising misinformation from the wailing negroes in the prison. In an eager antiphony, they recited what they knew, snatching the sentences from each other’s lips:
“Dem two niggers whut got away robbed de sto’ at Tickfall——”
“An’ kilt dat Mister Skull whut owned it——”
“De feller whut blows de cawnet-hawn done it——”
“He brag his brags dat he done kilt mo’ coons dan he kin count——”
“De monkey-faced tromboner hid behind de levee all mawnin’——”
“An’ de cawnet-nigger axed eve’ybody did us know de tromboner befo’ de tromboner would come out——”
“Ef you ketch ’em agin, Mister Rogers, does us niggers git de reward bill?”
Mister Rogers, accompanied by the two negroes, left the jail in a trot and a few minutes later the constable pounded with his night-stick on the front door of Sheriff Ulloa’s home, demanding admittance on most important business.
VI
IN THE MASSACRE SWAMP.
“We goes fo’ miles up dis levee to de Massacre swamp, niggers,” Mobile panted, as he ran. “Den faller de hog-path two miles to de ole Kerlerac plantation house. I knows dis country like I knows de insides of a white man’s hen-coop. Trot, niggers, trot!”
When the Federal soldiers visited the State of Louisiana during the Civil War, they carried guns and ammunition, but they did their best fighting and won their greatest victories and wrought their most extensive devastation with water—muddy river water.
Invading the State, they cut the levees of the Red, Atchafalaya, and Mississippi Rivers, and then let the snows melting on the loyal northern hills pour their floods and do their destructive work.
Because of this method of warfare, Louisiana was the last State to begin to recover from the effects of the Civil War.
Her agricultural enterprises absolutely require the protection of the river levees; prostrated financially, the State had no money to rebuild when peace was declared what war had destroyed.
Mobile, followed by Pap Curtain and Mustard Prophet, was going straight to a spot which indicated after half a century one of the effects of this mode of warfare.
The Kerlerac plantation house was a three-story building erected of stone conveyed, literally, from the ends of the earth, for the building material had been brought as ballast in the sailing vessels which landed with empty bottoms at the Kerlerac plantation to receive the products of her soil.
Yearly, during and after the war, the June floods had swept across that plantation, the water standing from four to forty feet deep above every inch of its soil.
The old plantation house, surrounded by its stately lawns and shaded by its colossal evergreen oaks, was abandoned, and now after sixty years the stone ruins stood in the midst of an almost impenetrable swamp and cypress trees nearly as large around as a man’s body grew in the center of the building, their branches protruding above where the roof had been.
The first gray streaks of dawn showed in the sky when Mobile led his panting and exhausted followers between the walls of this old house and allowed them a moment’s rest.
“Don’t take too long to blow, brudders!” Mobile warned them, his own tongue hanging out like a hot dog’s, his mouth spread wide, showing a gold front tooth. “Ef de white folks follers us, dey’ll come right straight to dis here house an’ start deir hunt from here. I knows ’em!”
“Whut you fetch us here fer, den?” Pap Curtain inquired indignantly.
“Us niggers is got to hab some money,” Mobile informed him, “an’ I knows whar a white man has hid some. Less git it, an’ ’vide up, an’ scoot!”
He walked through the briars and underbrush, stumbling among the fallen stones, to a certain corner; then motioning for silence, he listened.
“Dat mought be wind,” he muttered uneasily. “Den again, it mought be a steamboat puffin’ up de river. Den, agin, it moughtn’t.”
Raising a large stone, he kicked at the dirt underneath, then suddenly ceased his operations and listened.
Then in the dim light his face became ashen, turning a scar upon his cheek white, and his heart thumped like a drum. He let the rock fall back upon the treasure, and motioned to Pap and Mustard to follow, leading them four times around the walls and crisscross through the center and then back to the entrance.
“Listen, niggers!” Mobile chattered. “My Gawd, listen!”
Far across the swamp they could hear distinctly a steady repetition of three short sounds followed by a long, lowing bellow like a bull: “Ow, ow, ow! Oo-oo-oo-o!”
“Whut’s dat?” Mustard asked.
“Nigger dogs!” Mobile cried with a voice like a sob. “Bloodhounds!”
An uncontrollable sobbing seized the negro and his fright was pitiable. Mustard and Pap, having no experience with such dogs, looked at him uncomprehendingly.
Finally, Mobile dropped to the ground and listened. Then rising, he announced:
“A whole pack, niggers—dogs an’ men! We’ll never git outen dis swamp alive—dem dam’ dogs’ll gnaw our bones! Come on, less see kin we make it to de Massacre Bayou!”
They started on a straight line, running side by side.
Then within a hundred yards they faced a slough as large as a lake, no one knew how deep with mud and water. Taking a long detour around this, they looked back and in two miles of running, still found themselves in plain sight of the Kerlerac plantation house.
“Dat’s de las’ big puddle, niggers,” Mobile informed them. “Now go straight an’ wade eve’ything you come to!”
The ingenuity of the Spanish inquisition devised no tortures comparable to the possibilities of pain arising from a forced flight through a Louisiana jungle.
A vine trailing the ground for hundreds of yards in some mysterious manner wraps three times around a man’s leg, trips him, and leaves him to struggle with a bond which he cannot unwrap, cannot break, and cannot cut with a sharp pocket-knife.
Wild rose vines with thorns like spear-points and barbed like a fishhook snag the garments and the skin, and, like Shylock, demand their pound of flesh. Hidden in every puddle of water, the hard, sharp cypress knees lie ambushed in the mud like bayonets to impale anything which falls upon them.
Overhead, thorn-armed vines and the drooping branches of the dreadful prickly ash hang down to retard man’s progress and augument his anguish.
In every damp spot the deadly moccasin lurks; by every decayed stump and root the venomous cottonmouth guards its den; insects thrashed up by the agitation of the grass and weeds rise like an Egyptian plague and blind the eyes and fill the nostrils and choke the throat.
And through it all, mud which bogs the runner to his knees; at every twenty steps a pool of water and mire, which may be shallow enough for a sparrow to wade without wetting his feathers, or as deep as a well; and poison ivy, growing waist high, saturating man’s garments with its vitriol juices, and burning the flesh as if the runner were wading in a caldron of boiling oil!
But the pursuing dog slips unhindered through the jungle, runs unmired through the mud, swims the pools of water, and stands howling underneath the tree where the fugitive has climbed to escape the canine’s tearing teeth.
In half an hour the negroes, scratched, torn, snagged, wounded, bleeding, mud-covered, half-naked, looking more like wild beasts than men, stood on the banks of the Massacre Bayou. Forty yards behind them a pack of ravening dogs bayed a red-hot trail.
“Swim it!” Mobile panted. “Git across dis creek, fer Gawd’s sake!”
They leaped into the stream and dragged their exhausted bodies up the opposite bank just as the raging dogs stopped at the water’s edge on the bank they had just left.
Mobile ran to a hickory sapling as large around as his arm.
“He’p me break dis off, men,” he screamed. “We got to fight ’em!”
With the strength of desperation, the three men wrenched at the sapling, snapped it off at the roots, broke it in a proper length for a club, and as quickly as possible selected and prepared two others like it.
“Look out, niggers!” Mobile howled. “Dey’s gittin’ ready to swim across! Kill eve’y dog as quick as his front feet touches the land on dis side. Whatever happens, git dem big, black, long-eared debbils fust!”
While he was speaking two of the bloodhounds leaped from the bank and came toward them, swerving not an inch before the threatening clubs.
Mobile stepped to the edge of the water and stood poised to strike, his crazed eyes glaring at one of the swimming dogs, the features of his face quivering with spasms of pain and exhaustion. Then the hickory descended, and the immense dog sank under the water with a startled grunt.
Mobile and Pap both ministered to the other bloodhound which followed its mate to the bottom of the bayou.
Then the whole pack, deer-dogs, fox-hounds, hog-dogs, and mongrels, making the swamp hideous with their howls and yelps, sprang into the stream.
The three negroes ran up and down the bank of the stream, striking with weary arms, kicking with feet as heavy as lead, sobbing, praying, cursing, raving—adding their insane voices to the noise of the hounds, making pandemonium of the silent, shadowy swamp.
At last the hound-pack, wearied by swimming and unable to effect a landing, turned back to the opposite shore in defeat.
“Saved!” Mobile sobbed. “Now, niggers, trot down this here bayou till we git to de public road!”
Ten minutes later, they fell in the dust of the public highway like monstrous worms or rather like raw, skinned cattle divested of their hides and their carcasses left as food for the carrion crows.
For a few minutes they were motionless, lying like dead men; then a consciousness of approaching danger roused them to renew their flight.
Rising totteringly to their feet, they breathed deeply, and started. Then all hope died.
From out of the high weeds on the side of the road, a deep-seamed, weather-tanned Spanish face appeared, and two fearless eyes held the gaze of the helpless negroes like a hypnotist.
“You niggers stop right there!” a quiet voice said.
It was Sheriff Ulloa, who knew the route of fugitive criminals, and had taken the precaution to guard the only outlet from the Massacre Swamp.
“Please, suh, boss, save us,” the negroes sobbed in a chorus.
“All right,” the sheriff said grimly. “Trot right down the center of this road and go back to the jail you got out of.”
VII
“GON’ER GIT THEM NIGGERS!”
Just at noon the three negroes stumbled through the door of the jail, and like men walking in their sleep, obeyed the command of the sheriff and climbed the steps to the second story. There they fell to the floor and sank into unconsciousness.
The sheriff closed the jail door and sat down on the steps in front, where he gave himself up to most serious thought. Almost an hour later he arose, reëntered the jail, and returning to his three prisoners picked out Mobile Boone and kicked him into wakefulness.
“Get up, Mobile,” he commanded. “Follow me downstairs.”
Dumbly, the negro obeyed. On the ground floor the sheriff stopped and spoke:
“Mobile, what are you in here for?”
“I got drunk in de Chicken-Wing an’ tried to claw a nigger’s nose off.”
“Were you arrested with those other two negroes?”
“Naw, suh. Dey fetch me to de calaboose on Sunday mawnin’ an’ dem two coons come in late Sunday night. I never seed ary one of ’em befo’.”
“If I let you out will you leave town right away?”
“Bless gracious, boss,” Mobile exclaimed with most obvious sincerity, “ef you lets me outen dis jail, I’ll put dis town so fur behine me back dat it’ll cost you ninety-seben dollars to send me a postich card.”
The sheriff laughed.
“I means it, boss,” Mobile assured him. “Jes gimme a shirt an’ a pair of britches so I won’t look like I was jes’ bawned, an’ I’ll shore ax you good-by!”
The sheriff led the negro across to the office in the court-house, opened a closet, pawed over some old hunting clothes, and found some suitable garments for Mobile. When the negro had put them on, the sheriff handed him a silver dollar and said:
“Now, Mobile, I’ve let you out because the chances are those other two negroes are going to be mobbed. You are innocent and I don’t want to see you strung up. You’d better hit the grit!”
Mobile did. He went down the levee at a gait which bid fair to carry him very far in a brief time—if he could keep it up.
Then the sheriff returned to the jail and sat down in the same place.
The town of Kerlerac was deserted except for the women and children. Practically every male inhabitant had joined the most exciting of all chases—the man-hunt.
The sheriff placed a cigar in his mouth, chewed it almost to the other end without lighting it, then spat it out.
“When that searching party finds their dead dogs and drinks up all their red liquor,” he reasoned to himself, “and come back to town and find those coons in jail, they’ll form a mob. My deputies will desert the crowd when the mob forms, but they won’t join me. It’s up to me to protect the coons.”
The town-clock struck two.
Far down the road, Sheriff Ulloa heard the piercing yell of the fox-hunter.
“They’re coming back,” he muttered.
Taking a large pistol from the holster under his arm, he examined it carefully, revolving the cylinder between his thumb and finger.
A tiny chameleon was playing up and down the bark of a tree twenty feet distant.
With a motion which appeared almost careless, Ulloa made a turn of his wrist, there was a loud explosion from the gun, and the little creature spattered into fragments, leaving a dark, wet spot against the tree which looked as if a man had spat at a hole in the bark and made a center shot.
The shot aroused the two negroes on the floor above, and the man-hunters heard it and hastened back to town.
When the party arrived in Kerlerac they quickly heard of the sheriff’s capture of the fugitives, but not a man came to the sheriff to ask him about the capture. They gathered in a body in the Red Elephant saloon.
Soon one of the deputies, white-faced and panting, ran into the sheriff’s presence with the news that a mob was forming on the outskirts of the town.
“I expected that,” Ulloa answered quietly. “You and the other two deputies arm yourselves with rifles and hide in the tower of the court-house overlooking the front of the jail.”
“What must we do?” the deputy asked tremulously. “Shoot?”
“Do your duty!” Ulloa replied shortly, “whatever you conceive it to be.”
He turned and entered the jail, locking the door behind him.
“Boss,” Mustard Prophet called down to him, “me an’ Pap lef’ our toot-hawns down-stairs. Please, suh, fotch us up de cawnet an’ de trombone!”
With a grim smile the sheriff complied with the request.
“You niggers better play the Dead March in Saul,” he muttered grimly. “It’ll be appropriate all right.”
“Us ain’t ’quainted wid dat toon,” Pap grinned, reaching for his trombone. “But me an’ Mustard kin shore fetch ragtime and religion songs.”
In the meantime, in the far end of the town, sixty excited men had supplied themselves with enough rope to hang a man from a not too distant star; had armed themselves with knives and hatchets and axes, with guns and pistols; had appointed their leader, Barto Skaggs, a man of swarthy complexion, a grim mouth, surmounted by a black mustache, and intense, glowing black eyes, which pressed hard against the lids and showed a great deal of white beneath the pupil—the eyes of the wanton destroyer.
“Keep together, men!” Barto Skaggs advised. “When one man acts everybody act with him. Come on!”
With the first forward step of the mob a tall, gangling, half-wit boy, with a long neck, a step-ladder head, a long sharp nose, and a receding chin, and a loose-lipped mouth which dribbled tobacco-juice as he spoke, began to repeat like a chant:
“Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers!”
His harsh, crackly, gosling voice, uttering every word with a jerk, soon took the monotonous roll of a snaredrum. Unconsciously the men kept step to the words and the purpose expressed in the sentence was burned into the very fiber of their souls:
“Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers!”
Turning into the street which led to the jail two blocks away, the mob rounded the Confederate Circle, in the center of which was a ridiculous, stump-legged, pewter image of a man, too short in its stride for glory, but, nevertheless, erected by a grateful populace as a monument of glory to commemorate the heroes of the South.
Then Sheriff Ulloa stepped out of the jail, locked the door behind him, tossed the key as far as he could throw it into some high weeds growing at the side of the prison, and waited.
It was not necessary for the leader and spokesman to explain to the officer of the law the purpose of their visit.
Fully a block away the half-wit’s strident voice, having gained in volume by the constant repetition of the phrase, conveyed the message in tones which crackled like thorns under a pot:
“Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git——”
The mob halted.
“Turn around and go back, gentlemen,” the sheriff said courteously. “Start your one-man band to playing another tune, and go back!”
In the center of the street there was a rut which had been made by wagon wheels.
The mob moved slowly forward, and stopped at this rut like children toeing a mark in a spelling-match. They seemed to feel that a contest was on, and that this rut was the dead-line.
“We want them niggers, sheriff,” Barto Skaggs said.
“You shall not have them,” Ulloa replied quietly and forcibly. “When you kill those blacks every man of you is a murderer. I shall not be sheriff of a parish which contains sixty murderers—men of prominence—running at large!”
“Aw, come off, George!” an impatient voice exclaimed. “You’ve kilt a plenty of coons in your day!”
“Yes, gentlemen, I have,” Ulloa answered quickly. “I have never been slow to kill! And I was elected sheriff of this parish by you for the one purpose of totally abolishing this wholesale slaughter of innocent and unoffending blacks, and for the protection of offenders from mob violence in order that the law might take its course. I shall do it.”
Looking into the quiet, determined face of the officer, the mob wavered. Then the half-wit’s snare-drum voice rallied them:
“Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git them niggers! Gon’er git——”
The mob took one cautious step forward. Ulloa drew his pistol from his pocket.
“That’s far enough, fellow citizens,” he said, and now his voice drawled like the purr of a cat and was deadly in its menace. “When you get those niggers I won’t be the sheriff of this parish. I’ll be dead. I don’t know who’ll get me, but I’ll kill the first man who takes the next step forward!”
The mob packed denser, became tense, throbbed like an automobile when the power is turned on. Ulloa’s eyes gazed straight into the destructive orbs of Barto Skaggs and held him like a hypnotist. Then the half-wit began:
“Gon’er git—them niggers! Gon’er git——”
A back-handed blow from Barto Skaggs’s fist struck the half-wit fairly in the mouth and sent him reeling backward, disarranging for a moment the tense compact mass of men.
Then from the second-story front window of the jail, just above the sheriff’s head and behind him, there came a sound which caused the sheriff’s swarthy face to whiten to the eyebrows—the most unfortunate thing which could have happened to his cause:
“Oo-oh! My Gawd, my Gawd! De mobbers is comin’! De mobbers!”
Instantly the mob crouched like panthers ready to spring.
VIII
MOB AND MUSIC.
Up to the moment when their frightened screams had stirred afresh the mob’s lust to kill, Mustard and Pap Curtain had been totally ignorant of what was occurring outside the jail. Wandering idly to the window to look out, they had seen what every negro dreads, whatever the reason for his incarceration—a mob.
With the first frightened cry Sheriff Ulloa knew that it would be impossible to disperse the crowd before him. The scream of the quarry only stimulates the pursuit of the wolf-pack.
For two dreadful minutes the negroes sobbed and prayed; then Mustard Prophet turned shudderingly away from the window and, going to a window on the side of the jail, knelt at the casement and wept like a child, looking up now and then with fear-crazed eyes at the silent statue of the pewter hero of the Lost Cause.
Then while the grim sheriff stood poised and ready, fronting alone the crouching crowd of eager men, the shrill note of an automobile horn was heard and an immense machine whirled around the Confederate Circle and came sailing down the street toward the jail.
One block distant it stopped—abruptly.
The white-haired, white-bearded man at the steering-wheel gazed down the street in surprise. The scene was too familiar to require explanation. Leaping from the car, he walked slowly and cautiously down the street.
Then, up in the second story of the jail, Mustard Prophet leaped to his feet sobbing, praying, shrieking in a perfect frenzy of hope and fear.
“Oh, my Lawd!” he exclaimed. “Dar’s Marse Tom!”
Grabbing his cornet like a drowning man clutches at a straw, he placed it to his quivering lips. Loud and clear, throbbing with the eagerness of hope, the courage of despair, the strains of music became almost articulate speaking the words of a song:
All de world am sad and dreary,
Eberywhere I roam;
Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home!
The god Mars, who had witnessed many warlike scenes in Louisiana, never beheld an incident so grotesquely dramatic as this.
In front of the jail, grim, white-faced, desperate, determined to end his life right there, and perfectly sure that the end was near, stood Sheriff Ulloa. In the middle of the street, a mob, bloodthirsty and cruel, listening raveningly to the frightened screams of their quarry, and eager for the kill. Up the street, a man serenely observant, apparently indifferent to what was transpiring before his very eyes; while within the jail two strangling, fear-choked negroes whose breath was like the exhaust of an engine and whose hearts beat in their breasts like war-drums, sobbed and screamed and prayed and one of them played on a cornet Old Folks at Home!
Not since the poor, pitiful, dissipated author of that sweet folk-song stumbled over the ragged carpet in his miserable room in the Bowery, struck his head against his broken water-pitcher, bled to death upon the floor, and was carried to his grave while his friends sang his favorite song, had these words and their music been associated with so dramatic an event.
“Fer Gawd’s sake, Pap!” Mustard sobbed. “Come here an’ he’p me play dis toon! Don’t you see Marse Tom standin’ on dat cornder? Play, nigger, play! Say yo’ prayers in dat hawn when you toot it!”
All up and down de whole creation
Sadly I roam,
Still longing for de old plantation
And for de old folks at home!
Up the street the white-haired man listened, then took off his hat and scratched his head in a quandary.
“A mob set to music!” he smiled to himself. “This is something new to me. I wonder what that fool Mustard Prophet is doing here?”
He walked quietly down the street and stopped in front of the jail, taking his position by the side of Sheriff Ulloa. With a graceful gesture he removed his hat and thus fronted the mob, serene, powerful, his fine face glowing like an alabaster vase with a lamp in it, the wind tossing his snow-white hair and beard—the most striking and impressive figure one beholds in a lifetime. He stood with bowed head listening to the music:
Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home!
The music ended and the intense silence was broken by a voice in the mob:
“Aw, hell! I move we adjourn—back’ards!”
With a concerted movement like a piece of oiled machinery, the mob turned and tramped up the street like a drove of mules, leaving four lengthy coils of rope, a broken hatchet, a hoe-handle, and a corncob pipe in the middle of the road.
Turning with gracious Spanish courtesy, Sheriff Ulloa bowed low before the serene, powerful presence of Gaitskill, and murmured:
“I thank you. You saved my life!”
“Nothing of the sort!” Gaitskill snorted. “A mob can’t work to the tune of Suwanee River! Where’s that fool who’s blowing that horn?”
“I’ll conduct you to him,” Ulloa answered.
A minute later Gaitskill and Ulloa had secured another key to the jail, had entered, and stood in the presence of Mustard Prophet and Pap Curtain. The two negroes were too overcome to speak. Crazed by their horrible experiences, they sat wildly mumbling their prayers and uttering exclamations of thanksgiving.
“These are the men I telephoned you about,” Ulloa said.
“These are not the men we want,” Gaitskill replied in a disappointed tone. “One of these darkies is the overseer on my Nigger-Heel plantation.”
“You asked me over the telephone if one of them was yellow?” Ulloa said, pointing to Pap Curtain.
“Pap’s yellow, all right,” Gaitskill smiled. “But he’s not the man. He’s the well-digger of Tickfall. The coon we want is a nigger named Mobile Boone. He was seen early Sunday morning coming this way with my bag of money.”
Sheriff Ulloa opened his mouth to speak; then he closed it without saying a word.
“Marse Tom,” Mustard asked, “wus Mobile a yeller nigger wid a gold toof in his mouf an’ a scar on his jaw?”
“Yes.”
Mustard sprang to his feet with a loud laugh and gave Pap Curtain a mighty kick.
“Git up, Pap,” he howled. “Less go git Marse Tom’s money fer him!”
When a moment later the big automobile swung into the Massacre road leading to the old Kerlerac plantation house, Pap Curtain leaned over and whispered:
“Mustard, how you know dat Mobile is hid dat money under dat rock? S’posen you go dar an’ don’t find it? Whut’ll happen den?”
Mustard turned almost white. Then he answered:
“Pap, ef I don’t git dat money dese here white men will hang up my Chris’mus socks widout takin’ me out of ’em!”
IX
BACK TO THE OLD FOLKS.
Entering the stone ruins of the old plantation-house, Mustard walked unerringly to the large, flat rock which Mobile had lifted a few hours before and raised it from the ground. Pap Curtain clawed in the soft soil with his horny hands, then sprang to his feet with a yell.
He held the heavy canvas bag tied with a rawhide string.
Two hours later, Pap Curtain and Mustard Prophet, sons of sorrow, reach the pinnacle of happiness. Clothed in new garments, smoking cigars, rattling money in their pockets, they sat down in a banker’s five-thousand-dollar automobile, the owner at the steering-wheel, and started their journey back to Tickfall and the old folks at home.
Mustard Prophet, responsive as mercury to the least chill in the atmosphere or the slightest increase in the warmth of fortune’s sunshine, began to expand:
“Marse Tom, I shore hopes you’ll take better keer of de rest of yo’ dollars dan you did of dis bag of money. ’Twus a powerful hard day’s wuck fer me when I got it back for you!”
No answer from Colonel Gaitskill. The miles sped by.
Then Mustard asked, with as much curiosity as if he had been gone thirty years instead of less than three days:
“Marse Tom, is Hopey livin’ yit?”
“Yes.”
“I bet dat nigger wife of mine makes ’miration over dese here fine clothes I’m got on.”
Silence again, then a shout from both negroes:
“Bless Gawd! Dar’s Tickfall.”
When the car stopped in front of the bank, Gaitskill got out, carrying his money-bag, Pap and Mustard carrying their precious musical instruments.
“Marse Tom,” Mustard inquired, “does I git my same job at de Nigger-Heel back agin?”
“Certainly.”
“I’s shore glad of dat, Marse Tom. Sheriff Ulloa offered me a job, but I ain’t gwine take it.”
“What did the sheriff want you to do?” Gaitskill smiled.
“He axed me to he’p him lay a pipe-line to de Milky Way so he could start a dairy.”