The movement was so unanimous that Red Cutt was frightened. He had no desire to go out to that airplane in the dark. He remembered a negro who had come to a little town where he had lived once and had pretended to be able to walk on the water. He posed as a divine healer, and a frequently made statement was: “I kin walk on de water, but I don’t want to.” Thereupon some skeptical negroes had carried him down to the banks of the Mississippi and tossed him headlong into the yellow stream, insisting that he give them a demonstration of his ability to do what he said he could do. They had fished this divine healer out of the river with a hook and rolled him on a barrel for an hour before he showed the least sign of returning consciousness. Red Cutt was appalled by the thought of what might happen to him if that mob of negroes insisted upon his giving a trial flight. “Come on, niggers!” Vinegar Atts bellowed. “Less go out an’ see de flyin’-machine!” Three hundred negroes moved their feet as one man. Hitch Diamond laid his hand upon the arm of Red Cutt about as a policeman would put a man under arrest. Vinegar stepped forward and got on the other side of the aviator, and they conducted him down the rickety stairs of the lodge room and led the procession that formed in a straggling line in the middle of the sandy street. It was a night in which the moon shone in all its glory—such a moon as glows over the Louisiana swamps when the humidity of the atmosphere seems to focus the rays in startling brightness on every object. The negro is like a cat, sleepy and dull during the day; but he wakes up at night, and is a prowler in the streets and woods and fields. It was four miles to the Little Moccasin prairie, but that tramping crowd of men thought nothing of that, and as they marched they sang, keeping step to music that carried echoes of the African jungle, and those minor tones which are characteristic of all people who have been enslaved since the ancient days when subjugated Israel in the land of Egypt “hung their harps on the willows.” “Look here, niggers,” Red said to Vinegar and Hitch. “Dis is not de proper night to take a ride in a airplane. De moon is shining too dang bright. Ef I git up fawty thousand foots in de air, an’ look down at the yearth in dis moonlight, eve’ything below me would look like a smooth sheet of white paper. I never would know whar I come from, an’ I wouldn’t know whar to land, an’ I might drif’ off, whar nobody never could find me, an’ whar I cain’t never git back here.” “We don’t want nothin’ like dat,” Hitch Diamond growled. “We cain’t affode to lose you.” “Ef dese niggers insist on me takin’ a ride, how is we gwine prevent it?” Red Cutt inquired. “I’ll tell you,” Vinegar replied. “When we gits out whar de airship is at, I’ll make ’em a speech.”