“‘Why,’ says he, in his kind of Southern system of procrastinated accents, ’hain’t you heard tell?  There ain’t any man, black or white, in the Blue Ridge that can tote off a shoat as easy as I can without bein’ heard, seen, or cotched.  I can lift a shoat,’ he goes on, ’out of a pen, from under a porch, at the trough, in the woods, day or night, anywhere or anyhow, and I guarantee nobody won’t hear a squeal.  It’s all in the way you grab hold of ’em and carry ’em atterwards.  Some day,’ goes on this gentle despoiler of pig-pens, ’I hope to become reckernized as the champion shoat-stealer of the world.’

“‘It’s proper to be ambitious,’ says I; ’and hog-stealing will do very well for Mount Nebo; but in the outside world, Mr. Tatum, it would be considered as crude a piece of business as a bear raid on Bay State Gas.  However, it will do as a guarantee of good faith.  We’ll go into partnership.  I’ve got a thousand dollars cash capital; and with that homeward-plods atmosphere of yours we ought to be able to win out a few shares of Soon Parted, preferred, in the money market.’

“So I attaches Rufe, and we go away from Mount Nebo down into the lowlands.  And all the way I coach him for his part in the grafts I had in mind.  I had idled away two months on the Florida coast, and was feeling all to the Ponce de Leon, besides having so many new schemes up my sleeve that I had to wear kimonos to hold ’em.

“I intended to assume a funnel shape and mow a path nine miles wide though the farming belt of the Middle West; so we headed in that direction.  But when we got as far as Lexington we found Binkley Brothers’ circus there, and the blue-grass peasantry romping into town and pounding the Belgian blocks with their hand-pegged sabots as artless and arbitrary as an extra session of a Datto Bryan drama.  I never pass a circus without pulling the valve-cord and coming down for a little Key West money; so I engaged a couple of rooms and board for Rufe and me at a house near the circus grounds run by a widow lady named Peevy.  Then I took Rufe to a clothing store and gent’s-outfitted him.  He showed up strong, as I knew he would, after he was rigged up in the ready-made rutabaga regalia.  Me and old Misfitzky stuffed him into a bright blue suit with a Nile green visible plaid effect, and riveted on a fancy vest of a light Tuskegee Normal tan color, a red necktie, and the yellowest pair of shoes in town.

“They were the first clothes Rufe had ever worn except the gingham layette and the butternut top-dressing of his native kraal, and he looked as self-conscious as an Igorrote with a new nose-ring.

“That night I went down to the circus tents and opened a small shell game.  Rufe was to be the capper.  I gave him a roll of phony currency to bet with and kept a bunch of it in a special pocket to pay his winnings out of.  No; I didn’t mistrust him; but I simply can’t manipulate the ball to lose when I see real money bet.  My fingers go on a strike every time I try it.