“I’ve tried to be,” said Ug, picking up his derby hat.
Homeward through a quiet evening went Ug, very slowly; his square head was bent forward till his chin obscured his rubber collar; the path across the meadow was well defined by the rising moon, but Ug’s feet now and then strayed from it; he walked like a man very tired. Not far from his small red, white and blue cabin Ug stopped short. Something was moving in the grass near the path. Ug bent toward it. It was a large, glistening, red earthworm. Ug’s hands went up to his head, and when they came down one of them held his derby hat. A sharp motion and the hat went skimming out into the alfalfa. A hen, the property of a white neighbor, disturbed in her beauty sleep, cackled. Ug made other sharp motions. One of them stripped off his blue-serge pants. Another ended the earthly days of the hen by quick and vigorous strangulation. Still another plucked out the feathers; and yet another nipped the earthworm by the nape of its slimy neck before it could slither back into its burrow. Then the quiet night heard sounds—the sounds of a wild martial chant in a barbarous tongue:
“Koopeekis koopeekis
Bobbochee cheebobo
Toowanda bonda bonda, Patsy Duffy,
Bopokum kobokum.”
The owls and the gophers, the only witnesses, saw a plump square-headed man, with feathers in his hair, a knife in one hand and a wriggling worm in the other, twisting and turning and dancing a primitive abandoned dance in the moonlight.
Patsy Duffy, smoking his corncob on his porch in the cool of the evening, heard the distant sounds too. He heard them draw nearer. He did not understand what was happening till a fantastic figure bounded, as if it were India rubber, to his porch. He recognized Ug. It was not the Ug he had known.
It was an Ug with eyes that blazed, an Ug that spoke the chopped untutored speech of his ancestors.
“What the devil!” growled Patsy Duffy, starting up.