“Me, too,” Prince Total proclaimed. “I ain’t gwine meddle aroun’ de white folks wid dis hoodoo on me. I’ll shore git serious injury.”
“Us, too,” the other darkies announced promptly.
“Wait till I locks up de Hen-Scratch, niggers!” Skeeter Butts begged. “I ain’t gwine sell no mo’ booze dis day.”
“Less stay close togedder, niggers,” Vinegar Atts whined as they started down the dusty road toward the swamp. “Lemme walk in de exack middle of you-alls!”
The nearest edge of the Little Moccasin Swamp lay four miles from Tickfall. It was an oblong stretch of deep, black mud, and deeper and blacker water, measuring twelve miles the longest way, and six miles at its widest.
Except for one place, along the Little Moccasin ridge, it was traversable only by those who knew the swamp well, and had the instincts of a fox or wolf.
It was full of cypress trees and cypress knees, canebrake, and rank weeds, pestilential with disease, and inhabited by countless insects, bugs, worms, snakes, and animate things of that general nature which bit or stung or poisoned. It was the last place on earth which a white man would seek to escape bad luck.
The sun had set before the six negroes came to that point where the swamp came right up to the dusty parish road and ended in a fringe of weedy undergrowth. In the midsummer heat this undergrowth was ten feet high, making a thick curtain and from the rotting vegetation beneath there came an almost overpowering smell.
As the six negroes walked down the silent road, the darkness in the woods, increased by the interlocked branches of the trees, was intense and overwhelming. The green fringe of the swamp weeds took on fantastic shapes, and the negroes, through their disordered imaginations, beheld claws and wings, and leering eyes, and sneering mouths, and snarling teeth, and painted upon the black canvas of the dark were all the slimy, horrid forms which fear could conceive.