“Git ready to die! Git ready to die!” Vinegar bawled from house to house. “De ancestors will git you ef you don’t watch out!”
Under Hitch Diamond’s direction, all the negro settlements were being whitewashed. Under Vinegar Atts’s admonition the cabins were swept out, the yards were cleaned, the cabins were aired, and every scrap of paper and every particle of trash was gathered up and burned. These were not original ideas with the negroes. They had been taught this in the fever epidemic, when a government health officer had had charge of the sanitary work of the village.
The village began to fill up with strange darkies who had come in from the plantations and the swamp.
“Whut you coons doin’ here?” Vinegar Atts demanded of a bunch of them.
“Us come in whar de dorctors kin git to us easy,” one of them answered nervously. “Word wus sont dat all de niggers is about to die!”
“Dat’s right!” Vinegar bellowed. “But whut sort of sight will you coons be when you is dead—mud all over yo’ britches an’ no socks on? Git busy and clean up! Go down to de bayou an’ take a wash—buy you a clean shu’t an’ some socks—git ready to die!”
Skeeter Butts sat alone in the Hen-Scratch saloon. He was the only idler in Tickfall, a compulsory idler, for the reform had put him out of business. The sound of the fiddle and the banjo was heard no more. Laughter and shouting had ceased. Not a negro entered his barroom, and most of his regular customers passed on the other side of the street. Skeeter sat in front of his saloon all day in mournful and fearful loneliness.
Then, just at dark, he had the surprise of his life.
Three men came up the street and stopped, talked for a moment in low tones, then entered the saloon on tiptoe and came to where Skeeter was sitting behind the bar.
“Us is a cormittee to wait on you, Skeeter,” Vinegar Atts said in funereal tones.