“‘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
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