When Mustard and Pap woke up, they thought at first that the train had stopped.
Then peeping out cautiously, they ascertained that the engine had sidetracked their car and gone on. Finding themselves in the middle of an immense sugar plantation, they climbed on top of the car to reconnoiter.
Their first familiar sight was a broad, muddy river.
“Dar now!” Pap exulted. “Dat’s ole Massasap. Home’s up de ribber.”
“I bet dis here plantation ain’t fur from some town,” Mustard reasoned. “Less hoof it up de river an’ see kin we find some place whut ain’t so lonesome.”
Picking up their musical instruments, they walked to the levee and turned upstream.
“I smells Tickfall,” Mustard muttered, sniffing the air. “’Tain’t no matter how fur it is, dis river goes past it.”
“I hopes Tickfall ain’t smellin’ us,” Pap declared. “I’s got it proned into me dat we made a good riddunce outen dat place.”
Two miles up the levee and around a bend in the river, they came to a little town squatting like a bullfrog under the protection levee, its gutters running constantly with the seepage water from the dike, its few houses clothed in river fog and standing on high foundations like stilts, the paint upon them cracking and their eaves dripping with moisture.
“Dis here town looks like a spindle-shanked crane,” Mustard declared in disgust. “Dem legs under dem houses is shore fixed fer wadin’.”
Then a prominent building came into view, and Pap Curtain stopped like a man turned to stone.
“I knows dis here town,” Pap declared. “Dey calls it Kerlerac.”
“How fur from Tickfall?” Mustard inquired.
“Come on, den. Less meet deir ’quaintance.”
“Naw, _suh_!” Pap protested. “You see dat high buildin’ over dar? Two nigger womans helt me up in front of dat Red El’phunt s’loon an’ robbed me of a dollar an’ fo’ bits. One of ’em helt a razor at my neck, an’ de yuther tuck my loose change.”
“Dat don’t make no diffunce,” argued Mustard. “Dey ain’t dar now.”
“I reckin not!” Pap said positively. “I kotch ’em when dey wusn’t lookin’ and helt ’em by deir hair and bumped deir heads togedder! An’ what you reckin dem womans done? Dey paid a white lawyer my own good money to git me in a lawsuit wid de cote-house, an’ dey put me in de chain-gang fer six mont’s.”