“Mebbe I could work some kind of flim-flam wid dat hoss,” he sighed. “But I cain’t make money very fast ef I got to ’vide up my profits by ten.”
It had never occurred to Skeeter to question the white man’s ownership of that horse, nor his right to dispose of it. The animal looked like just such an old skate as a broken-down race-horse man would own at the end of his track career. When a horseman retires from the turf, he generally has something like that to get rid of.
Skeeter did not get to his home on Sheriff John Flournoy’s premises until midnight. He did not go to see his new horse until the next morning at feeding-time.
When he went to the pasture, he found that a gap was broken in the fence and the horse was gone.
“We better hunt dat hoss befo’ he gits too fur away,” Skeeter said to himself. “I reckin he’s gone back home; but I don’t know whar his home is at, an’ I ain’t know which way to look fer him.”
Two hours later all ten owners of the animal were searching for him. Such a task was hopeless at the start, for the animal could go into the swamp in any direction around Tickfall and disappear forever. A strange animal, like a strange man, seldom came out of that jungle if he entered it alone.
The ten men made a circle of the town, walking on the edge of the swamp, looking for tracks. They were experienced in reading signs, but they could not find a place where an animal had entered the jungle. Concluding that the horse had kept in some beaten path, they separated, each following a winding trail in the great hot-house of the morass, slimy with rusty-colored oily water, and all acrawl with repulsive form of insect and animal life.
At noon they all met at the broken place in the fence where the horse had escaped. The ground was soft, and yet they could find no hoof-tracks leading from the field to the highroad.
They did not know that Dick Nuhat had tied some cotton bagging under each hoof of his limpy horse before he led him through the gap.
About ten o’clock that night, Conko Mukes, entered the Hen-Scratch saloon.