There was no answer. Hitch had long before deserted the colonel and gone to the Shoofly church.
“I bet that coon answers promptly to-morrow morning,” Gaitskill laughed as he grumblingly filled the glasses.
“Christmas is coming!” a laughing chorus murmured.
Suddenly there was a shout which rolled like thunder over Tickfall, the sound permeating even the thick walls of the Tickfall bank.
“Listen to the niggers!” Flournoy grinned.
There was a moment’s silence; then the mighty ululations of a negro song floated to them on the wings of the wind. The men arose.
“Health and long life to us all!” Dr. Moseley repeated.
“To us all!” the men murmured with nodding heads. Then they drank.
Time inevitably weakens all reforms. It robs the greatest and most imminent danger of its terror. And time completely overthrew the reform in Tickfall and so endowed the negroes with courage that any timid darky would have tickled the whiskers of a bearcat with the end of his flat nose.