The negroes drew the first easy breath they had taken for several minutes. “Praise de Lawd!” Vinegar laughed. “I’s glad I kept my good senses and didn’t git skeart!”
“Skeart!” Hitch Diamond mocked derisively. “You wus so skeart you wus squealin’ like a burnt pig!”
“I warn’t really a coward,” Vinegar said defensively. “But I wus sort of discreet. An’ I wusn’t by myself in dat—dis whole mob of niggers wus movin’ from side to side in dis here prairie like butter-beans b’ilin’ in a kittle.”
“Shore dey wus,” Hitch Diamond answered. “Dey wus skeart an’ I wus skeart an’ eve’ybody wus skeart—escusin’ you.”
“Dat ole airship is jes’ like a ole dog widout no teeth—it makes a lot of noise, but ’tain’t no harm,” Vinegar said complacently.
Suddenly, from the direction of the setting sun, a long, slanting shadow crossed the prairie like a black knife cutting through their composure and leaving them wide open to the terror which approached.
The airplane was advancing upon them, apparently just skirting the tops of the trees, and the noise of the exhaust of the engine was deafening, terrifying, nerve-racking, a sound which reminded these country negroes of nothing so much as a great forest fire in a cane-brake where the popping of the cane is like the musketry of battle. They did not know whether to run or lie down or stand still, but finally their action was universal and automatic—they tumbled over on the ground like a lot of dead geraniums in a broken pot. All of this was an experience so entirely new to them that there was no precedent; they had never been along that path before. That great motor sounded to them like disease and death, and it made enough noise to make a snail jump through a barrel-hoop.
But there is one thing every negro can do. His fright is like kerosene poured on hot coals: it goes up in vapor and goes off with a bang. When those explosive sounds began to prod the negroes like hat-pins running into their ears, they began to howl and pray, and from five or six hundred throats there arose an assorted series of yells—they sang a long scale of variegated vociferations of fright—and they uttered implorations and prayers, and made promises to the God of heaven in return for his protection, promises which they could not have remembered in sober moments, much less performed.
As the machine came nearer to them and looked like it was coming down to the ground to mow them down with its wide-spreading wings, five hundred men, women, and children flattened themselves upon the ground, uttered a farewell gasp like a fish dying in the bottom of a boat and prayed that God would remove all rotundity and make them as flat as a withered leaf to meet this emergency that was upon them.
When about one hundred feet above the ground the aviator tossed out of the machine Hitch Diamond’s bag of cotton waste. Had he known the contents of that bag he would have tossed it out a long time before. During all his stunts in the air he had held this sack of worthless cotton waste, and out of the kindness of a heart that was full of love for a woman he had returned it to the rightful owners.
The bag landed on the shoulders of Vinegar Atts. Vinegar merely spread out like a busted bag of oats and sang an up-and-down tune of assorted prayers like the howling of a hound dog. After a long time, when the exhaust of the engine sounded far away, he slowly rose up like a mouse in a trap, scared and begging on its hind legs.
“My Gawd!” he whooped. “I had a powerful good chance fer heaven dat time. I’m got more lives dan a litter of kittens!”
Then, seeing the bag of cotton waste on the ground, for some reason he got the notion that Hitch Diamond had hit him on the back with that bag. He picked it up and struck Hitch over the head with it.
Hitch cautiously raised his head and elevated his face toward the sky, his nose wrinkled up like the front of a washboard. The airplane was far away. He slowly turned his head and saw Vinegar standing beside him with a bag of cotton waste in his hand. His eyes stuck out like the buttons on an overcoat, and he rose from the ground and started for Vinegar with a bellow of rage which had made him famous in the pugilistic ring in the South.
As if in answ............