Then Vinegar Atts replied with just two words: “Ye-es, suh!”
Slowly he turned and started toward the street, Hitch Diamond walking beside him. Two and two, the crowd of negroes silently fell into line and marched out.
Skeeter Butts was the last to leave.
As Skeeter started through the gate he felt Flournoy’s heavy hand upon his shoulder and winced.
“Tell me the truth, you little yeller devil!” Flournoy drawled. “Didn’t you niggers know all the time that that was a joke?”
Skeeter chuckled evasively. He had no intention of revealing a secret of the most secretive race in the world; least of all did he intend to make trouble between the white folks by revealing the fact that Dr. Sentelle, pitying the fright and ignorance of the negroes, had investigated, learned the facts, and informed them.
But the sheriff’s hand upon his shoulder was suggestive of the majesty and might of the law, and Skeeter had a mortal fear of getting, as he would have expressed it, “into a lawsuit wid de cotehouse.”
“Yes, suh,” Skeeter chuckled. “We did learn a leetle about dat befo’ Chris’mus. We borrowed a lot of papers from de white folks an’ didn’t see nothin’ about it in deir papers, so us soupspicioned dat you had done got up a buzzo on us. But us is all Christians, Marse John—we don’t bear you no grudge!”
Then he slipped from the hand of the law and ran laughing down the street.