“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.