That each negro was satisfied with his job was apparent from the fact that he took out a cigarette and lighted it, and sat for a while in silent meditation. At last Vinegar spoke.
“We done collected up over a hundred dollars already.”
The eyes of Red Cutt glowed like the little green eyes of a pig. He wet his lips with his tongue as if he could already taste that money. His fingers twitched and he clasped them together covetously, saying, in a voice that was hungry with desire:
“Gimme dat money, quick, niggers. I always demands my pay in eggsvance.”
The four negroes promptly emptied their pockets of the money they had collected, and Red Cutt drew a large buckskin bag from his coat pocket and eagerly stuffed the soiled currency into its depths.
“I thinks eve’y nigger dat pays his dollar out ought to be allowed to wear some kind of badge what shows dat be belongs,” Vinegar Atts remarked.
“I forgot to tell you about dat, nigger,” Red Cutt replied promptly. “So I wants you to pass de word down de line to eve’y nigger dat paid his dollar dat he must get a chicken feather and wear it stuck up in his hat.”
By two o’clock that afternoon, one hundred negroes in Tickfall suddenly sprouted feathers, and refused to tell in answer to any inquiry just what those feathers meant, for if a negro organizes a club or lodge, it is always a secret organization.
It was Sunday afternoon.
That morning, Vinegar, at the Shoofly church, made many eloquent references to the chariot of fire, to the men from the sky, to the machine that had a wheel in the midst of a wheel, and a form of a man’s hand under the wings. It was just the sort of mysterious, high-sounding, and meaningless sermon that would catch the fancy of his emotional and imaginative parishioners and the services at the Shoofly church on that particular morning were memorable.