Dr. Sentelle was a scholar, an orator, and a cripple. All that can be comprised in the statement that the people, white and black, loved him almost to adoration, will express what he was to Tickfall.
Vinegar Atts was a squatty, pot-bellied black giant with long gorilla-like arms; he was bald except for a little tuft of hair over each ear, which made him look like a moon-faced mule wearing a blind bridle. He was not a scholar, nor a cripple. He could hang some steel hooks in a five-hundred-pound bale of cotton and trot up the gangplank of a steamboat singing a religious song and not start the perspiration on the top of his bald head by the achievement.
As for oratory, his colored friends thought that Vinegar was the prince of platform spellbinders. He had the pertinacious guinea-fowl’s gift of gab, a voice which could be heard for two miles, and a vox humana stop to his chest tones that threw in the tremolo for funeral and evangelistic occasions and made his emotional auditors weep copiously over something they did not know anything about.
Vinegar paused at the gate because a stranger was sitting on the porch beside Dr. Sentelle. Vinegar “read sign” on this strange white man to determine whether it would be worth while to go up and interrupt his conversation by requesting a favor. The stranger was old, white-haired, and his movements and the sound of his voice indicated that he was feeble. Vinegar did not know it, but he was looking at the Rev. Dr. Gilbo, president of the Silliway Female Institute.
“Dat white man is some sort broke-down preacher,” Vinegar soliloquized, and he rattled the gate-latch loudly.
“All right, Vinegar, come in!” Dr. Sentelle called. “What do you want?”
“’Scuse me, white folks,” Vinegar murmured, bowing apologetically to the stranger. “I come to ax Elder Sentelle could he he’p me outen a jam.”
“Has the Shoofly outfit fired you?” Dr. Sentelle smiled.
“Naw, suh. Dey’s gwine bestow special honors on me to-night,” Vinegar chuckled, smoothing his stovepipe hat with a big handkerchief. “I done spent de day fixin’ up de chu’ch wid flowers, an’ now I needs two mo’ things to gimme style. Is you white folks got a pulpit chair an’ a ’lectric readin’ lamp dat you ain’t needin’?”
Dr. Sentelle appeared to give himself up to deep thought. In reality he was devoting himself to an internal enjoyment of that amusing request. Dr. Gilbo uttered a surprised chuckle which he promptly covered by a cough and hastily offered Vinegar a cigar.