Uncle Benny’s a sight. He’s been constable here at Oak Bluff, Florida, for twenty years. We figure it keeps him out of worse trouble to let him be constable. He’s the quickest shot in three counties and the colored folks is all as superstitious of him as if he was the devil hisself. He’s a comical-appearing somebody. He’s small and quick and he don’t move—he prances. He has a little bald sun-tanned head with a rim of white hair around the back of it. Where the hair ends at the sides of his head, it sticks straight up over his ears in two little white tufts like goat-horns. He’s got bright blue eyes that look at you quick and wicked, the way a goat looks. That’s exactly what he looks and acts like—a mischievous little old billy-goat. And he’s been popping up under folks’ noses and playing tricks on them as long as Oak Bluff has knowed him. Doc in particular. He loved to torment Doc.

And stay home? Uncle Benny don’t know what it is to stay home. The Old Hen’ll cook hot dinner for him and he won’t come. She’ll start another fire in the range and warm it up for him about dusk-dark and he won’t come. She’ll set up till midnight, times till daybreak, and maybe just about the time the east lightens and the birds gets to whistling good, he’ll come home. Where’s he been? He’s been with somebody ’gatoring, or with somebody catching crabs to Salt Springs; he’s been to a square-dance twenty miles away in the flatwoods; he’s been on the highway in that Ford car, just rambling as long as his gas held out—and them seven pieded bird-dogs setting up in the back keeping him company.

It was seven years ago, during the Boom, that he bought the Model-T and begun collecting bird-dogs. Everybody in Florida was rich for a whiles, selling gopher holes to the Yankees. Now putting an automobile under Uncle Benny was like putting wings on a wild-cat—it just opened up new territory. Instead of rambling over one county, he could ramble over ten. And the way he drove—like a bat out of Torment. He’s one of them men just loves to cover the ground. And that car and all them bird-dogs worked on the Old Hen like a quart of gasoline on a camp-fire. She really went to raring. I tried to tell her then ’twasn’t no use to pay him no mind, but she wouldn’t listen.