The liveryman was not at all disposed to do what Skeeter wanted, but Skeeter had learned certain conjuring tricks to attain his ends, and he now performed these tricks with the influential names of Colonel Tom Gaitskill, Sheriff John Flournoy, and Dr. Moseley.
With these big names thundering in his ears, the liveryman consented.
“Keep dis quiet, Lon!” Skeeter warned. “It’s de white folks’ awders. Don’t speak a word!”
Two hours later, a long, black carriage, known to the negroes of Tickfall as the “pest-wagon,” drawn by two solemn mules and driven by Skeeter Butts, stopped at the rear door of the Hen-Scratch saloon.
Skeeter dismounted from the driver’s seat and opened the door in the rear of the ambulance. Hitch Diamond, Figger Bush, and the Reverend Vinegar Atts climbed out. They pulled a stretcher into view, and Skeeter laid hold upon it.
They tramped into the Hen-Scratch saloon like a quartette of pall-bearers, and walked to the pallet where Dazzle Zenor, the actress, now acting the part of a Red Cross nurse, had just completed a major operation upon the face and hands of Tick Hush. Tick was lifted upon the stretcher, carried to the ambulance and placed inside.
Skeeter tied a piece of yellow cloth a yard wide and two yards long to the door knob of the ambulance, and climbed back to the driver’s seat.
The four stretcher bearers walked solemnly beside the pest-wagon.
Every negro inhabitant of Dirty-Six crowded the sidewalks and watched this dreadful wagon go by. All the older ones recalled that fearful epidemic of yellow fever years before when this wagon had rolled along the streets at midnight, and a driver with muffled mouth, breathing through a cloth saturated with disinfectants, called aloud in sepulchral tones:
“Bring out your dead!”