“Dat’s de sentence whut suits me best,” Skeeter announced. “I don’t want no disasterous an’ unnervin’ consequences when I gits up in de air.”
“Dis here am de very book dat shows you how not to have ’em,” Red Cutt said. “An’ dis is de rule dat we go by.”
He rapidly turned over the pages of the preface, indicating a place on the page, and allowed Vinegar to resume his reading.
“‘Do not rush students through deir trainin’. Haste makes waste. Dis fack should be inscribed on de door of every hangar.’”
“Hanger!” Figger Bush exclaimed. “How come dat book speaks about hangin’? I thought we wus talkin’ about flyin’, an’ now you done got off de subjeck.”
The other three negroes looked at Red Cutt rebukingly, as if they also thought that he had brought into the matter of flying a theme which no negro in the South cares to discuss. He is willing to walk, to run, to swim or fly, but he has an insuperable aversion to hanging.
“Dat shows dat you niggers have got a heap to learn,” Red Cutt laughed. “A hangar is jes’ like a stable. You keeps a buggy in de stable, an’ a automobile in de garage, an’ a airplane in a hangar.”
“Mebbe so,” Skeeter said in a dissatisfied tone. “But I don’t like dat word, jes’ de same.”
“Dar ain’t no noose to dis hangar I speaks of,” Red Cutt assured him.
“No noose is good noose,” Skeeter proclaimed. “But I don’t like dat word.”
“Don’t let a word pester you,” Red Cutt laughed as he rose to his feet and picked up his hat. “Meet me at de Nights of Darkness lodge to-night an’ I’ll tell you some things dat will git on your squeamishness heap wuss dan a word.”
“We will all be dar!” the quartet chorused.
“All you got to do is to be dar wid yo’ dollar,” Red Cutt answered as he stepped through the green-baize door of the saloon.
The ancient Greek of apostolic days was not alone in his eagerness “to see and to hear some new thing.” When the word went abroad in the negro settlements of Tickfall that there was to be a new thing at the lodge that night, cost of admission being one dollar, three hundred and twenty-five negroes, by methods distinctly Ethiopian, secured the necessary dollar, which for that night only was the password to the lodge.
When Red Cutt appeared upon the scene, he by himself was worth the price of admission. He had dressed himself in a faint imitation of the costume of an aviator. That costume was a mixture of all the varied uniforms that he had seen, and portions of which he could acquire.