“An’ cute little pants jes’ de color of a rotten egg busted on ’em——”
Their recitation was interrupted by the sound of galloping hoofs. Two mules were coming down the road at full speed, one mule ridden by a bent-shouldered old man whose kinky white wool fitted his head like a rubber cap, and the other ridden by a diminutive, pop-eyed boy so black he could shut his eyes and become almost invisible.
At every jump the riders belabored their mules with clubs, thus giving them additional reasons why they should accelerate their operations; and even the mules seemed to realize that it was an urgent case.
They shook their heads, groaned like elephants in distress, and seemed to measure off ten or fifteen feet at a leap. The riders jolted to and fro like two gray squirrels in the storm-tossed branches of a tree, but they hung on to the shaggy manes of their mounts with one hand and operated their clubs with the other.
“Hey, you niggers!” Gaitskill called. “Whoa!”
The mules, hearing that last command, stopped.
Now when a mule stops, he stops with a suddenness; he stops all over and all at once; he stops like a wet dish-rag which drops upon the floor, like a stepladder which collapses and comes down flat upon the ground.
The mules stopped.
Isaiah and Little Bit did not. They went on. They dived ungracefully over the heads of their mules, struck the ground twenty feet ahead of them, rolled over and over in the moist sand, then got up in a most solemn and dignified manner, walked sedately to the spot where Vinegar and Hitch sat on the curbstone, and took a seat beside them.
“Bless gracious, Marse Tom!” old Isaiah panted. “I’s skeart plum’ outen my good sense!”