Figger was necessary because his superb voice added to the others, completed the most melodious male quartette in Louisiana. Hitch Diamond as a prize-fighter, Vinegar Atts as an ex-pugilist who had been called to preach, each possessed the physical strength of a forty-horse-power mule. Skeeter needed them to lift his automobile out of the mud and to push it through the sand.
Was not that a thoughtful selection of first-aids to the helpless?
Truly, that outfit was a fearful and wonderful thing.
When those four negroes climbed into that car and began to sing to the accompaniment of a mechanism which sounded like a saw-mill, a cotton-gin, and a boiler factory loaded upon a log-train chasing a herd of bleating billy-goats along the public highway, the effect produced made the pious cross themselves, the ungodly “cuss,” and the little children run to their mothers, whimpering with fright.
A white man might think a thousand years and never think up an arrangement like that.
Then to show that his mental incubator was still capable of hatching out little fuzzy, two-legged chicken-headed thoughts, Skeeter bought a steamboat!
“Whar is Hitch Diamond at, Kunnel?” Skeeter asked of a handsome, white-haired gentleman standing in front of the Tickfall post-office.
“He’s up at my house, unloading fireworks from a dray,” Colonel Gaitskill answered.
“Hitch don’t go back to wuck to-day, do he?” Skeeter inquired in a shocked tone.
“Certainly not,” Gaitskill smiled. “This is a national holiday. I imagine Hitch has finished that little job now. Are you folks going off to make a day of it?”