“I’s powerful proud to hear dat, kunnel,” Hitch declared. “An’ please, suh, kin I fotch up de rear an’ keep dese niggers from laggin’ back?”
“Yes, if you prefer that place.”
“Hitch needs he’p, kunnel,” Vinegar Atts declared promptly. “I’ll fetch up behine wid Hitch.”
“All right,” Gaitskill agreed, stifling a desire to laugh. “Of course, if Diada should attack us from the rear——”
“Huh!” Vinegar Atts interrupted him. “I’s gwine fetch up de exack middle of dis here peerade.”
“Now, listen!” Gaitskill commanded in a loud voice. “I don’t want Diada hurt in any way. Don’t use any clubs or guns or knives. Catch her with your hands. Come on, men!”
The posse pounded down the swamp road for four miles, then started in single file along the narrow bridle-path which led to the hog-camp three miles distant in the center of the swamp.
From the moment they entered the swamp the shouts and laughter of the negroes ceased.
They had all spent their lives within sight of that jungle and knew well its fearful menace and entertained toward it a most wholesome fear. They knew that three deep, broad bayous flowed into it, widened into an enormous mud-puddle and disappeared, swallowed up by rank, encroaching vegetation. They knew that the slow-moving, slimy water was a breeding place for countless insects which stung and bit and poisoned, and inhabited in pestilential swarms the only open breathing spaces reserved amid the vegetation, and they had seen cattle stagger out of that swamp, their nostrils, throats, and ears filled with tiny insects, fall to the ground in convulsions, and die.
The ground around them was covered with vegetation, so ropy with vines that a raccoon could not penetrate it; the branches of the immense trees hung downward, and were draped with long, ropelike funereal streamers and festoons of Spanish moss, so that it seemed that half the vegetable world was growing from below upward and the other half was growing from above downward, making a hot-house purgatory, shut off from the sky above and the earth below, and enclosing the men who rode that narrow path like a trap.