Skeeter took a big breath and sighed in happy anticipation.
“I leaves on de midnight train fer N’Awleens, an’ I stays dar till I gits dis money well spent. I’ll see de nigger shows, ride on all de street-cars, eat hot roasted peanuts, travel up ’n’ down on de yellervators, chaw beefsteak two inches thick, an’ buy me a derby hat an’ a suit of clothes wid so many colors dat when I walks up Canal Street de white folks will think de lightning done struck de rainbow!”
“I’m going to buy a steamboat,” Nuhat said musingly. “Thirty feet long, eighteen feet wide, floating on top of the water like a cigar-box, propelled by a paddle-wheel about as big as a barrel, with a little donkey six-snort-power engine. It has a speed of six miles an hour down-stream, if the current is good. Going up-stream, it gets there when it can.”
“Huh!” Skeeter grunted.
“It costs two hundred dollars,” Nuhat continued. “I expect to live and die on that boat. I love to sit and think!”
“Ain’t you gwine do nothing but think?” Skeeter asked, to whom such an occupation was utterly foreign and beyond his comprehension.
“Yes—I’m going to turn honest. Everybody will know me as a good white man.”
“White folks is diffunt from niggers in deir notions of havin’ fun,” Skeeter said meditatively. “Turnin’ honest an’ thinkin’ don’t look like a awful good time to me!”
“I understand,” Nuhat replied. “A negro has a one-cylinder mind and a smoky spark-plug.”
“But dat good time I plans don’t sep’rate me from mo’ dan fifty dollars of my money,” Skeeter proclaimed. “De rest goes todes startin’ me in de movie bizness. De nex’ time you steals a hoss an’ rides through Tickfall, you’ll see Skeeter in charge of a fust-rate nigger movin’-picture show.”