Org and Little Bit loved to play in an old storehouse situated in the corner of the yard in the rear of Gaitskill’s home. There was a reason. Both loved sweets, and in that house was where Colonel Gaitskill stored his famous ribbon-cane sirup. This sweet, so famous in the State, is not marketable. When once it is put in a barrel or other container, it cannot be moved or it will turn to sugar. Even with the greatest care, it is pretty sure to turn sugary before it is all used up. The sugar forms first a hard crust around the inside of the barrel and around the spigot from which it is drawn. Sometimes you can turn that spigot on full and the stream will be a tiny thread of liquid sweetness which flows with exasperating slowness. A moment later the sugary obstruction may break from around the spigot, and after that, the flood!
Doubtless Shakespeare had such a catastrophe in mind when he wrote of
The taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much.
Half a dozen times a day Org and Little Bit slipped into this storeroom, turned on the spigot of the sirup barrel, caught the tiny stream of sweetness in the palms of their hands, and lapped it out with their tongues.
They were at that enjoyable diversion now.
Suddenly there was a loud whoop of fright from the direction of the orchard where Mustard Prophet had gone to gather some figs for lunch. The boys ran to the door and looked out. They saw Mustard climb down from a rickety step-ladder, fold that ladder together and hurl it in the direction of some object. Then he came out of that orchard, stepping high like a turkey wading through mud, looking constantly behind him, and making as many different noises with his mouth as a whole brass band.
Hopey, thinking he had been bitten by a snake, met him half-way to the house.
“Whut ails you, Mustard?” she asked.
“My Gawd, Hopey!” he panted. “Dar’s a alligator out in dat orchard fawty feet long! I seen it!”
The noise Mustard made had brought all the members of the family out to see what the trouble was. When he told them of seeing the alligator, Org said nothing, and the others of the household were skeptical and laughed at him.
“How do you know you saw an alligator?” Colonel Gaitskill asked.
“I throwed a step-ladder at it, Marse Tom,” Mustard wailed. “It wus longer dan de ladder.”
“Come back to the orchard and show me,” Gaitskill ordered.
“Naw, suh!” Mustard whooped. “Go look fer yo’se’f, boss. Dis nigger is done seen aplenty!”
“Whut wus he doin’ in dat orchard?” Hopey howled.
“He wus aimin’ to climb dat step-ladder an’ bite my leg off when I seen him,” Mustard shuddered. “I gib him de ladder an’ tole him he could take my place!”
“Don’t make so much noise, Mustard,” Gaitskill commanded, as he turned away and entered the house. Nobody credited Mustard’s story, except Org and Little Bit, and they slipped away as soon as they could to see if their alligator was still in captivity.
They found that he had escaped, and a broad trail led across the dust of the pig-lot toward the orchard. The alligator had crawled through a hole. The boys promptly decided not to enter the orchard for any purpose whatsoever. Thinking further, they decided they had better absent themselves from home for the day, for that alligator might do all sorts of sensational stunts, and they had seen enough of his performances the day before.
Besides, Colonel Gaitskill might want to know how the creature got on the premises, and Org had found that the best way to avoid answering questions was to be where questions could not be addressed to him.
At that moment there came to the ears of the two boys a dull explosion. They turned their faces in the direction of the sound and left home.
It is a pity that they did not first return to the storehouse and turn off the spigot of the molasses barrel. But they did not. That sirup ran two days and one night!
One of the annoyances of agriculture in Louisiana is stumps. Whenever a farmer undertakes to blast the stumps out of the ground with dynamite or powder, he is sure to have a crowd of small boys to watch him. Org had been on the trail of the dynamiters for a number of days. Whenever they heard an explosion, they knew that some farmer was having a celebration of fireworks and profanity, and they hurried to the spot, guided by the explosive noises.
By being around, they had surreptitiously acquired a number of dynamite caps, also several yards of fuse in various lengths. The sound they had heard a few minutes before was over in the direction of the Cooley bayou, and they went.
What they saw when they got there, put the fear of dynamite in their souls forever.
There was a man who lived on the Cooley bayou who walked on a wooden peg. He had attempted to dynamite a fish-hole. He lighted the fuse of the dynamite stick and walked toward the pool to toss the stick into the water. His wooden peg found a soft place in the earth, and he sank into the mire up to his knees. He pitched forward on his face, the stick of dynamite fell from his hand and rolled just a few feet out of reach. The peg leg was twisted under the sod and marsh-grass in such a way that the unfortunate man could not tear himself loose and escape from the stick of dynamite.
The explosion tore a hole in the ground in which a large automobile might have been easily concealed, and friends of the cripple found scraps of him hanging in the trees a hundred yards away.
Org and Little Bit arrived just in time to view the effects of the tragedy, and came away with a deep impression of the explosive power of dynamite.
“Dat stuff ain’t nothin’ fer us to fool wid, Marse Org,” Little Bit said earnestly. “Jes’ look whut dat little stick of dynamite done to dat big growed-up man. Ef a wad of dynamite wus to bust close to us, de white folks would hab to put on deir readin’ specks to find de pieces, an’ dey’d tote us bofe back to Tickfall on a shingle.”
“I know where plenty of blasting powder is,” Org remarked. “Uncle Tom has a whole keg of powder in his barn.”
“Dat’s de stuff fer us to monkey wid,” Little Bit agreed. “Us don’t hab to play wid so much at one time dat we git blowed plum’ away.”
They found the keg of powder and carried it down to the little branch which ran around the edge of the town. They were very careful as they went around the stable, not to step on the alligator. As they carried their powder away, they looked back frequently to assure themselves that the alligator was not in pursuit. When at last they had reached the woods, they decided that it would be a good idea to make several loud explosions to scare the alligator and keep him from coming in that direction.
They spent several hours experimenting with the powder, enjoying themselves in a variety o............