“Ef she cain’t talk to us, an’ we cain’t talk to her, we shore ain’t gwine fuss an’ fall out!” Vinegar declared.
The big, fat, squat-legged preacher trotted along beside the giant prize-fighter toward the swamp, and by the time they turned off the main road on to the bridle-path which led to the Gaitskill hog-camp, Hitch had told the preacher as much about Diada as he thought Vinegar ought to know. Needless to say, he did not mention her ugliness, her size, her love for raw meat, nor his own overwhelming fear of her.
“Whut’s de matter wid dis swamp, Hitch?” Vinegar demanded, gazing at the trees and wiping the copious sweat from his face.
The swamp had suddenly become as hot as an anteroom to hell. The trees had lost their green sparkle, assuming the colors of decay—corpseyellow and livid green, shining with an oily, sickening glitter.
Hitch shuddered. It was easy for him to believe that Diada had conjured the swamp and had caused it to assume this aspect of menace.
“Less hump along to’des de hog-camp, Revun!” he exclaimed. “I’s skeart of dis place. I been talkin’ to hear my tongue rattle, but now I kin shet my mouf an’ hear my jaws rattle.”
Something scared the birds in the jungle and they flew shriekingly from tree to tree, all going in the same direction.
Submerged among the immense trees of the jungle the negroes could not tell what was happening in the heavens, but they noticed that the sun had changed, no longer spraying off of the tops of the trees like falling water, and the path at their feet had become almost invisible in the darkness.
A wind suddenly swept through the forest, cold as a breeze from the arctic icebergs. Every tree and shrub leaned away from that icy blast, and vines which trailed the ground for hundreds of feet slowly rose up and whirled and writhed in the air like long, slim snakes. In twenty seconds that one puff of wind had passed and there was no more, and the scalding heat rose from the ground like steam from the boiling caldrons of Tophet.
At any other time, Hitch Diamond would have known that a Southern rain-storm was coming and would have paid no attention to it except to seek a cleared spot in the forest, where the dead limbs falling from the trees could not impale him to the ground.