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“He was about the size of a first baseman; and he had ambiguous blue eyes like the china dog on the mantelpiece that Aunt Harriet used to play with when she was a child. His hair waved a little bit like the statue of the dinkus-thrower at the Vacation in Rome, but the color of it reminded you of the ‘Sunset in the Grand Canon, by an American Artist,’ that they hang over the stove-pipe holes in the salongs. He was the Reub, without needing a touch. You’d have known him for one, even if you’d seen him on the vaudeville stage with one cotton suspender and a straw over his ear.

“I told him what I wanted, and found him ready to jump at the job.

“‘Overlooking such a trivial little peccadillo as the habit of manslaughter,’ says I, ‘what have you accomplished in the way of indirect brigandage or nonactionable thriftiness that you could point to, with or without pride, as an evidence of your qualifications for the position?’

“‘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.