It was full of cypress trees and cypress knees, canebrake, and rank weeds, pestilential with disease, and inhabited by countless insects, bugs, worms, snakes, and animate things of that general nature which bit or stung or poisoned. It was the last place on earth which a white man would seek to escape bad luck.
The sun had set before the six negroes came to that point where the swamp came right up to the dusty parish road and ended in a fringe of weedy undergrowth. In the midsummer heat this undergrowth was ten feet high, making a thick curtain and from the rotting vegetation beneath there came an almost overpowering smell.
As the six negroes walked down the silent road, the darkness in the woods, increased by the interlocked branches of the trees, was intense and overwhelming. The green fringe of the swamp weeds took on fantastic shapes, and the negroes, through their disordered imaginations, beheld claws and wings, and leering eyes, and sneering mouths, and snarling teeth, and painted upon the black canvas of the dark were all the slimy, horrid forms which fear could conceive.
At last they came to the bridle path which branched from the parish road and followed the Little Moccasin ridge to the Dorfoche bayou.
Up to this point in their flight the negroes had traveled in a bunch, but the narrow path now required that they go in single file?
“Who is gwine take de lead?” Skeeter Butts asked.
“Not me,” Vinegar Atts bellowed. “My ole maw tole me dat I wus borned under de sign of de goat, but I ain’t gwine butt head-fust inter dat swamp. My dream specify fear, trouble, an’ sorrer. I got a plenty now!”
“I ain’t gwine lead,” Figger Bush said positively. “Ef one of dem big swamp jack-rabbits like de one I dreamed ’bout wus to hop acrost my path, I’d straddle eve’y tree in dat swamp!”
“I don’t figger on headin’ de peerade,” Pap Curtain proclaimed. “I got a hunch dat I better take good keer of myse’f. My dream specify serious injury. It don’t take hardly nothin’ to hurt a nigger ef luck’s agin him.”
“I backs out, too,” Prince Total declared. “Dat path ain’t wide enough fer no wagin wheel, but I ain’t sayin’ dat a wheel _cain’t_ run on it!”
“I’s gwine fetch up de rear,” Hitch Diamond boomed in his deep bass. “Misforchine, great loss, an’ death is a plenty fer po’ Hitchey to tote along wid de crowd ’thout gittin’ ahead of de bunch wid his load.”