“Say, Kerl, where’s that damn little pet nigger of yours?”
“Haven’t seen him to-day, Colonel.”
“He’s run off somewhere with Orren, and Orren hasn’t come home yet.”
“I’ll find him,” Kerley said eagerly.
“Oh, no! Don’t trouble yourself,” Gaitskill smiled. “I just wanted to know about Little Bit.”
Gaitskill sat down with a sly grin. He was getting old, he reflected, and the strenuous life was no longer attractive. If a searching party should have to be organized, he had now laid its foundation. It was a certainty that Kerlerac would organize the party and lead the search. Good old Kerl would see that Virginia’s brother was not lost.
It does not take a rumor long to spread over a little village. In a brief time, it was known to the remotest parts of Tickfall that Little Bit and Orren Gaitskill were lost.
Little Bit’s mother, in spite of the fact that she had fourteen others just like him in her cabin, aroused all the negro section of the town by her frantic wails. She announced in a voice like a calliope that she knew that her angel child had fallen into a well, had been eaten by an alligator, had been bitten by a snake, had been drowned in a bayou, had been stolen and carried away by white folks, had been lost in the swamp—and she howled like a banshee over each one of these possibilities, and others of the same general nature as she thought of them.
A great bellow of excitement went up from all the negroes, and a band of them hurried to the home of Captain Kerlerac to inquire the latest information about Little Bit. Their excitement was contagious, and the captain caught it, the white citizens of the town were inoculated, and in an incredibly short time the town was seething with an intense desire to organize a search-party and explore the woods for the lost boys.
“We’ll wait until night, men,” Kerlerac said. “If the boys don’t come in by dark, we will go out on the Little Moccasin Road and build fires on the highway for ten miles. Wherever they may be in the swamp, they will see that trail of fire and come to it.”