“I done slanderized the debbil too frequent in my sermonts!”
He turned his face until his eyes looked straight into the face of the setting sun, and he began to leave the scenery of the swamp behind him. He did not run. No man can run as fast as the Rev. Vinegar Atts was traveling.
And Vinegar knew where he was going. In the very heart of that Little Moccasin Swamp was the Moccasin prairie. It was an open space containing nearly a square mile of ground without a tree or stump. It was completely surrounded by water, and two years before a raging forest fire had left it a charred ground strewn with ash and soot. Now it was covered with grass and was as smooth as a baseball diamond. Vinegar was including that open space in his route toward Tickfall because he could travel across it with ease and speed.
Suddenly every winged creature of the swamp broke the silence and became vocal with screams of fright. Hundreds of wild pigeons rose in the air and began to describe mad circles over the head of the running negro. From all the watercourses rose the wild fowls that love the low, damp marshes, and they sailed upward with hoarse shrieks of fear. The angry, fighting, bark-like call of the hawks, mingled with the scream of eagles, and these fearless birds sailed straight into the glowing red eye of the sun to meet the peril that was coming.
Vinegar Atts could not see because he was blinded by the sun. But soon a roar sounded above him like the exhaust of an automobile, and Vinegar looked up.
An airplane was climbing the pathless air in long, spiral flight directly over his head—the first flying-machine that the Rev. Vinegar Atts had ever seen. Its long wings were tipped as with fire by the rays of the setting sun. Beneath it the screaming birds sailed wildly, madly, performing all sorts of aerial stunts.
Vinegar dropped on his knees, with his arms stretched up toward the graceful creation of man’s brain and hands. A few phrases from his old, worn Bible came to his mind, and he bellowed them at the top of his voice, as he listened to the exhaust of that great motor.
“Like de noise of chariots on de top of mountains, like de noise of a flame of fire dat devoureth de stubble—all faces shall gather blackness—dey shall run like mighty men——”
The birds scattered far and wide over the swamp. There was a great silence. Vinegar opened his eyes, and lo, the airplane was sailing slowly downward.
“My Gawd!” Vinegar howled. “De chariot of fire!”