Three hundred negroes moved their feet as one man. Hitch Diamond laid his hand upon the arm of Red Cutt about as a policeman would put a man under arrest. Vinegar stepped forward and got on the other side of the aviator, and they conducted him down the rickety stairs of the lodge room and led the procession that formed in a straggling line in the middle of the sandy street.
It was a night in which the moon shone in all its glory—such a moon as glows over the Louisiana swamps when the humidity of the atmosphere seems to focus the rays in startling brightness on every object. The negro is like a cat, sleepy and dull during the day; but he wakes up at night, and is a prowler in the streets and woods and fields. It was four miles to the Little Moccasin prairie, but that tramping crowd of men thought nothing of that, and as they marched they sang, keeping step to music that carried echoes of the African jungle, and those minor tones which are characteristic of all people who have been enslaved since the ancient days when subjugated Israel in the land of Egypt “hung their harps on the willows.”
“Look here, niggers,” Red said to Vinegar and Hitch. “Dis is not de proper night to take a ride in a airplane. De moon is shining too dang bright. Ef I git up fawty thousand foots in de air, an’ look down at the yearth in dis moonlight, eve’ything below me would look like a smooth sheet of white paper. I never would know whar I come from, an’ I wouldn’t know whar to land, an’ I might drif’ off, whar nobody never could find me, an’ whar I cain’t never git back here.”
“We don’t want nothin’ like dat,” Hitch Diamond growled. “We cain’t affode to lose you.”
“Ef dese niggers insist on me takin’ a ride, how is we gwine prevent it?” Red Cutt inquired.
“I’ll tell you,” Vinegar replied. “When we gits out whar de airship is at, I’ll make ’em a speech.”
In an hour they reached that point in the Little Moccasin prairie where the airplane rested on the smooth short grass. When they approached that wonder-mechanism of man’s hand and brain, the negroes became reverently silent, and yet that silence was vocal with the weird, nerve-racking funereal sounds of the swamp. Great bullfrogs bellowed like multitudinous lost cattle; a wildcat screamed like the tones of a woman in great pain and fright; and the swamp wolves galloped to the edge of the clearing and barked at them with all the annoying impertinence of fice dogs.