Two hours later the automobile party returned to the river.
They unloaded four baskets of food and four large watermelons. Figger Bush had advocated bringing a jug, but Skeeter Butts had vetoed the suggestion on the ground that it might offend the Reverend Vinegar Atts, chaplain. Skeeter knew better than that, but he saw no reason why he should furnish the bunch with a gallon of liquor when he did not drink himself.
“How we gwine git dis truck to dat boat?” Hitch Diamond growled, looking across the water in surprise.
“How did dat Pipe Smash git to land when de little canoe is tied up agin de side of dat steamboat?” Figger Bush asked.
“He come in hand over hand on de rope,” Skeeter Butts informed him. “Pipe knowed ef he tied dat canoe to de land some nigger would steal it.”
“Dat’s a fack,” Hitch Diamond bellowed. “’Taint safe to leave nothin’ aroun’ whar a po’ nigger kin set down an’ trabbel in it.”
Skeeter Butts laid hold upon the line and passed over to the boat swinging by his hands as agile as a monkey. Then he put to shore in the canoe and ferried his friends across. Afterward, he brought in the food supplies.
“We’ll trabbel up de river fust, niggers,” Captain Skeeter Butts announced, as he and Hitch Diamond busied themselves with the fire in the furnace. “Soon as I gits a little practice wid runnin’ her, we’ll turn down stream an’ paddle plum’ to de Gulf of Mexico.”
As far as they could see, they were the only living creatures on the river. The noon sun blazed in the heavens and made the deck of the boat like a furnace; the heat reflected from the water was simply dreadful. A white man would have fallen with heat prostration in an hour, but these children of the sun laughed and sang and shouted, and stood in the blaze of light, grinning, white-toothed, and perfectly happy.
They ate watermelon, gobbled their lunches, smoked cheap cigars, and talked like a lot of gobbling turkeys. Finally Vinegar Atts walked to the edge of the boat and looked down in the muddy swirl of the Mississippi.