“Mebbe so,” Vinegar Atts growled. “But it ’pears to me like we left dat boat in de middle of de river, an’ dat’s jes de same as givin’ it to any nigger dat’s willin’ to ketch holt.” “Dat’s de way I felt when I left her,” Figger Bush cackled. “I warn’t needin’ no steamboat jes’ den. Skeeter said dat steam-gage wus a cuttin’ up! I tuck his word fer it ’thout lookin’.” “Us, too!” Hitch and Vinegar agreed. “Nothin’ didn’t ail dat steam-gage,” Skeeter snapped. “Dat boat didn’t bust-she never would ’a’ busted. My eyes wus kinder jiggerty an’ I couldn’t look real good.” “You didn’t talk that way on de boat,” Vinegar Atts growled. “I done loss my twenty-five dollars because you didn’t hab sense enough to watch yo’ bizziness!” “My hind-sight is always better’n my eye-sight,” Skeeter Butts replied in piteous accents. “I must hab got started wrong end foremost in dis worl’, for I never sees nothin’ till I gits past it.” “Stop blimblammin’, niggers!” Commodore Hitch Diamond ordered. “Mebbe we’ll git back to Tickfall in time to see de fire-works.” “Dat reminds my mind!” Skeeter Butts exclaimed. “Marse Tom Gaitskill tole us to git back from de river in time to he’p him shoot ’em off!” The Fourth of July in Tickfall was a Gaitskill institution. In the month of May, 1865, Tom Gaitskill returned to Tickfall in the tattered gray of a Confederate soldier--a colonel at nineteen years of age. He cast off the past with his worn-out garments, married a beautiful girl, and started with her, hand in hand, along the paths of peace. Two months later, on the Fourth of July, he dragged the only cannon Tickfall possessed to the top of the hill in front of his house, invited every white child and every negro piccaninny to his home to witness the celebration, and with his own hands fired one shot from the cannon for every year of independence in the United States of America. As the years passed, the Gaitskill Fourth of July celebration grew and developed and became a social institution, until finally, when wealth flowed in upon Gaitskill in a golden stream, he made it a practice to entertain the whole population of the village on that night. The fiftieth celebration was now in progress. On Gaitskill’s spacious lawn in front of his house, all the white people, men, women, and children, had assembled; in a large horse-lot by the side of the house, all the negroes had congregated; across the street in a large pasture was an immense accumulation of fire-works. Fifty years had performed gracious offices for Tom Gaitskill and his wife. The beauty and nobility of honorable old age was theirs, as they stood beside the white colonial columns of their home and welcomed their guests, white and black. The two presented a picture which a man sees once in a lifetime--then remembers it forever more. Suddenly “Old Sneezer,” the venerable Tickfall cannon, boomed!