In the slaughter of the hogs care was exercised not to kill the big fighting males. They were the leaders of the herd, and when they led in a fight for the protection of the females or the young, everything cleared out of their path as before the onrush of an express train. The females were also protected. The young male hogs were slain, their flesh being tender and easily made into hams, bacon, and salt shoulders for food on the plantation.
This is one of the most dangerous games ever played in the Little Moccasin Swamp. Some of the big male hogs are six feet long and four feet high. They travel with the speed of a race-horse, and have the fighting instincts of a tiger. From their lower jaws great, ugly tusks protrude. They can run at full speed past a horse, and by an upward thrust of that lower jaw can split the flesh of the animal’s leg as if cut by a razor, or disembowel him completely.
A man in the midst of a fighting herd is helpless. When he hears an old sow pop her jaws, or sees her coming through the underbrush with a swinish roar, he will climb a prickly ash-tree or jump into a vat of tar to escape.
As the herd on this day was hedged in between the lakes and driven forward, the men heard before them, at the point where the slaughter was to be, the crack, crack, of a rifle. When at last the entire crowd had converged at the shooting-post, they found a strange negro standing with dozens of dead hogs around him. A dozen rifles were resting upon the top of a stump by his side; and as the young pigs rushed past him he raised a gun with a careless gesture, fired with seeming indifference but with absolute accuracy, and at each shot a young hog rolled over with a broken neck.
The men watched this exhibition of sharpshooting with great astonishment. The marksman never seemed to take aim, and yet never missed. Just as a man can reach up and put his finger on his nose, so this man could put a bullet through the neck of a running hog and think nothing of it.
In a little while nearly two hundred hogs were waiting for the knife of the butcher. Everybody lent a hand in the job of dressing them and loading them into wagons for their trip back to town.
Vinegar Atts, Skeeter Butts, and Shin Bone worked together. They spent a great deal of their time in low-toned conversation.
“I figgered dem wild hawgs would chase dat nigger off’n de top of de world,” Vinegar lamented as he glanced malevolently toward the stranger, who was sitting beside a stump, smoking a cigarette.
“It didn’t pester him at all,” Skeeter sighed. “He looked like he enjoyed hisse’f real good. Reckon how come dat nigger didn’t git in de army, when he kin fight an’ shoot so good?”
“De only way to skeer dat nigger is to take his guns away from him,” Shin remarked. “He feels powerful secure when he’s got a gun, an’ I feels—otherwise.”