The eyes of Red Cutt glowed like the little green eyes of a pig. He wet his lips with his tongue as if he could already taste that money. His fingers twitched and he clasped them together covetously, saying, in a voice that was hungry with desire: “Gimme dat money, quick, niggers. I always demands my pay in eggsvance.” The four negroes promptly emptied their pockets of the money they had collected, and Red Cutt drew a large buckskin bag from his coat pocket and eagerly stuffed the soiled currency into its depths. “I thinks eve’y nigger dat pays his dollar out ought to be allowed to wear some kind of badge what shows dat be belongs,” Vinegar Atts remarked. “I forgot to tell you about dat, nigger,” Red Cutt replied promptly. “So I wants you to pass de word down de line to eve’y nigger dat paid his dollar dat he must get a chicken feather and wear it stuck up in his hat.” By two o’clock that afternoon, one hundred negroes in Tickfall suddenly sprouted feathers, and refused to tell in answer to any inquiry just what those feathers meant, for if a negro organizes a club or lodge, it is always a secret organization. It was Sunday afternoon. That morning, Vinegar, at the Shoofly church, made many eloquent references to the chariot of fire, to the men from the sky, to the machine that had a wheel in the midst of a wheel, and a form of a man’s hand under the wings. It was just the sort of mysterious, high-sounding, and meaningless sermon that would catch the fancy of his emotional and imaginative parishioners and the services at the Shoofly church on that particular morning were memorable. At the most dramatic point of Vinegar’s harangue, the colored clergyman took a letter out of his pocket and read it to his congregation with many theatrical flourishes. There are big corporations in this country who do a large mail-order business. Of necessity, they must have a large mailing-list, and in order to acquire it they pay two cents for every name and address that is furnished them. Very much of that money is wasted in the South, and a great deal of their literature is squandered, for the reason that those who sell these addresses do not care whether it is the name of a man white or black. Many negroes who cannot read get regular letters from great mail-order houses, and other large corporations who have something to sell will frequently address a letter to a colored man who cannot read it, and cannot understand it when it is read to him. By this method Vinegar Atts had acquired the letter, which he was now parading before his congregation, and which he read in a loud, clear voice: “REV. VINEGAR ATTS, “Tickfall, Louisiana.