“Gee,” he grinned, as he began his scenario, “that’s an utterly wretched title, I don’t think!”
III
THE MOVING PICTURE WRITES
When Rouke entered the Shoofly church next morning, he found the pulpit chair occupied by the Reverend Vinegar Atts, while forty of his parishioners sat in mute and reverent attitude in the pews.
Rouke stood for a moment in the dusty, smelly, dilapidated building, gazed at the rude benches scrawled with names and dates and letters, and at the windows whose broken panes had been mended by different colored glass, and his artistic soul got a cold chill. The place looked like a morgue and the occupants reminded him of stiffs.
“Bring your congregation out in front, Atts!” he called. “I want to see ’em in the sunlight!”
Standing in the churchyard, Rouke got his first look at some of our old acquaintances: Skeeter Butts, small, wiry, dressy, his face saddle-colored, his hair close-cropped with the part in the middle made by a razor, his shirt-collar so high that he resembled a sorrel mule looking over a whitewashed fence; Figger Bush, with his kinky wool, his ratlike eyes, and his shoe-brush mustache; Hitch Diamond, massive, solid, built like a rock quarry; and a dozen more men and a score of women filed out behind them and stood about the steps of the church.
Skeeter Butts suddenly left his place, passed around to the other end of the group, and stood close beside a certain girl.
Rouke, watching him, found in that moment the bright particular gem for the Jewel of the Jungle.
Lalla Cordona was well worth looking at.
She stood among the others as distinct as a polished diamond lying in a slag-heap, slim and straight as a javelin, graceful as a stalk of waving corn, the features of her coal-black face as clear-cut as a cameo, her flexible, expressive lips curling smilingly over absolutely flawless teeth—she was as exquisite as a statue carved in ebony by the hands of Beauty and Grace.