“So I plays the rabbit on them. I jumps into the palmeeters. I gits down hog-style and crawls off. I plumb snaked into those palmeeter clumps and takes me a palmeeter root for a pillow.

“That was yestiddy mornin’,” he said, “and I ain’t so much as moved my jawbones until this mornin’.”

The Georgian puzzled. “Cain’t them fellers foller ary track?” he asked.

“Cooter’s a prime bloodhound.” Tim winked broadly. “But I was hittin’ the ground too fur apart!

“Well,” he went on, “they was shore I hadn’t made the hammock without they’d of seed me. So they beats around and tracks here and yonder, and pokes in the palmeeters, scairt as chickens they’d fall on snakeses, and they sits down to wait for me.

“I says to myself, ‘I hope you scoundrels does squat there.’

“I could hear them talkin’ plain as this room. Cooter says: ‘I know that feller in the blue pants squatted in here in the palmeeters, but say, that son of a bitch in the striped shirt that runned to the hard road, he didn’t even go around the stumps, he jest tossed over ’em!’

“We was jest out of the swamp, like, and I was all buried up in the mud. Hit shore was cold, wet muck, black as a nigger’s gizzard. When the sun gits high and beats down thu those palmeeter fans, one side o’ me was a-freezin’ and t’other was a-burnin’ up.

“Along toward noon I was so half froze and half scorched I thinks I’ve been there long enough. And then I studies, and I says, ‘Hit’ll be a heap longer thirty days in the county jail.’ So I settles down to enjoy myself. There’s times a palmeeter root’s shore a soft pillow. If my wife was to put me a thing like that in the bed, I’d shore chunk it at her, but me and that palmeeter root got real fondlike.

“The antses got to me and got a-stingin’, but Cooter must a plumb set in some, for I heerd him a-slappin’ and a-cussin’. I begins to get thirsty and my tongue shore swole up when the other catbird goes back to the Chivvolay and brings ’em a jar o’ water. But I thinks: ‘Let ’em drink.’

“Cooter sends his man back to smash up the still, but he done a mighty sorry job. I can git it together again in no great whiles.

“Then I hears ’em crank up the Chivvolay and my ol’ flivver and go off. I studies some and I figgers they mought not o’ gone no further than the hard road, a trap, like. So I lays quiet a piece longer.