“Dat’s de way I felt when I left her,” Figger Bush cackled. “I warn’t needin’ no steamboat jes’ den. Skeeter said dat steam-gage wus a cuttin’ up! I tuck his word fer it ’thout lookin’.”
“Us, too!” Hitch and Vinegar agreed.
“Nothin’ didn’t ail dat steam-gage,” Skeeter snapped. “Dat boat didn’t bust-she never would ’a’ busted. My eyes wus kinder jiggerty an’ I couldn’t look real good.”
“You didn’t talk that way on de boat,” Vinegar Atts growled. “I done loss my twenty-five dollars because you didn’t hab sense enough to watch yo’ bizziness!”
“My hind-sight is always better’n my eye-sight,” Skeeter Butts replied in piteous accents.
“I must hab got started wrong end foremost in dis worl’, for I never sees nothin’ till I gits past it.”
“Stop blimblammin’, niggers!” Commodore Hitch Diamond ordered. “Mebbe we’ll git back to Tickfall in time to see de fire-works.”
“Dat reminds my mind!” Skeeter Butts exclaimed. “Marse Tom Gaitskill tole us to git back from de river in time to he’p him shoot ’em off!”
The Fourth of July in Tickfall was a Gaitskill institution.
In the month of May, 1865, Tom Gaitskill returned to Tickfall in the tattered gray of a Confederate soldier—a colonel at nineteen years of age.