“Dat big old animile ain’t gwine die,” Little Bit chuckled. “Us ain’t hurt him none, an’ by dis time to-morrer he’ll be ready to fix fer anodder fight.”
“I’m through fighting alligators,” Org said wearily. “I never was as hungry and tired in my life. But we’ll keep this old sucker in his pen and make him our pet alligator.”
XV
BLASTING POWDER
Org and Little Bit loved to play in an old storehouse situated in the corner of the yard in the rear of Gaitskill’s home. There was a reason. Both loved sweets, and in that house was where Colonel Gaitskill stored his famous ribbon-cane sirup.
This sweet, so famous in the State, is not marketable. When once it is put in a barrel or other container, it cannot be moved or it will turn to sugar. Even with the greatest care, it is pretty sure to turn sugary before it is all used up. The sugar forms first a hard crust around the inside of the barrel and around the spigot from which it is drawn. Sometimes you can turn that spigot on full and the stream will be a tiny thread of liquid sweetness which flows with exasperating slowness. A moment later the sugary obstruction may break from around the spigot, and after that, the flood!
Doubtless Shakespeare had such a catastrophe in mind when he wrote of
The taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much.
Half a dozen times a day Org and Little Bit slipped into this storeroom, turned on the spigot of the sirup barrel, caught the tiny stream of sweetness in the palms of their hands, and lapped it out with their tongues.