“We’ll slick him up an’ git him feelin’ good an’ bet on him some ourselfs,” Skeeter said.
“Don’t make him look too fit,” Nuhat warned him. “That horse’s looks get the odds against him. Nobody bets against something that looks like a winner.”
A few minutes later the white man bought a package of cigarettes from Skeeter Butts, thanked him for the sale of the horse, and walked out.
Until midnight Skeeter was alone in the Hen-Scratch. No one came in to patronize his soft-drink emporium. The man was in the depths of despair. His place had always been the popular hang-out for all the plain loafers and fancy sons of rest. Now there were none so lazy as to enter a place which had nothing of its former attractiveness but a name.
“De niggers avoids dis place like it wus a pesthouse,” Skeeter lamented to himself. “Ef I had about two hundred dollars I could start me a movin’-picture show fer colored only in dis little house, an’ sell soft drinks on de side. Dat would fotch de crowd back, an’ de men would bring de lady folks, an’ I could git rid of a lot of ice-cream combs an’ things like dat.”
He smoked many cigarettes, lighting a fresh one on the stub of each old one, trying to think out a way to get some money for his new enterprise.
“Mebbe I could work some kind of flim-flam wid dat hoss,” he sighed. “But I cain’t make money very fast ef I got to ’vide up my profits by ten.”
It had never occurred to Skeeter to question the white man’s ownership of that horse, nor his right to dispose of it. The animal looked like just such an old skate as a broken-down race-horse man would own at the end of his track career. When a horseman retires from the turf, he generally has something like that to get rid of.
Skeeter did not get to his home on Sheriff John Flournoy’s premises until midnight. He did not go to see his new horse until the next morning at feeding-time.
When he went to the pasture, he found that a gap was broken in the fence and the horse was gone.
“We better hunt dat hoss befo’ he gits too fur away,” Skeeter said to himself. “I reckin he’s gone back home; but I don’t know whar his home is at, an’ I ain’t know which way to look fer him.”
Two hours later all ten owners of the animal were searching for him. Such a task was hopeless at the start, for the animal could go into the swamp in any direction around Tickfall and disappear forever. A strange animal, like a strange man, seldom came out of that jungle if he entered it alone.