oat them down a little way, tie them up again, and
claim the prize-money for salvaging them, God willing.

The Persimmon was so called from a scar on his long slanting head. A
steamboat mate had once found him asleep in the passageway of a lumber
pile which the boat was lading, and he waked the negro by hitting him in
the head with a persimmon bolt. In this there was nothing unusual or
worthy of a nickname. The point was, the mate had been mistaken: the
Persimmon was not working on his boat at all. In time this became one of
the stock anecdotes which pilots and captains told to passengers
traveling up and down the river.

The Persimmon was a queer-looking negro; his head was a long diagonal
from its peak down to his pendent lower lip, for he had no chin. The
salient points on this black slope were the Persimmon's sad, protruding
yellow eyeballs, over which the lids always drooped about half closed.
An habitual tipping of this melancholy head to one side gave the
Persimmon the look of one pondering and deploring the amount of sin
there was in the world. This saintly impression the Persimmon's conduct
and language never bore out.

At the time of the Persimmon's remarks about the raft two of Peter's
callers, Jim Pink Staggs and Parson Ranson, took the roustabout to task.
Jim Pink based his objection on the grounds of glutting the labor
market.

"Ef us niggers keeps turnin' too many raf's loose fuh de prize-money,"
he warned, "somebody's goin' to git 'spicious, an' you'll ruin a good
thing."

The Persimmon absorbed this with a far-away look in his half-closed
eyes.

"It's a ticklish job," argued Parson Ranson, "an' I wouldn't want to
wuck at de debbil's task aroun' de ribber, ca'se you mout fall in,
Persimmon, an' git drownded."

"I wouldn't do sich a thing a-tall," admitted the Persimmon, "but I jes'
natchelly got to git ten dollars to he'p pay on my divo'ce."

"I kain't see whut you want wid a divo'ce," said Jim Pink, yawning,
"when you been ma'ied three times widout any."

"It's fuh a Christmas present," explained the Persimmon, carelessly,
"fuh th' woman I'm libin' wid now. Mahaly's a great woman fuh style. I'm
goin' to divo'ce my other wives, one at a time lak my lawyer say."

"On what grounds?" asked Peter, curiously.

"Desuhtion."

"Desertion?"

"Uh huh; I desuhted 'em."

Jim Pink shook his head, picked up a pebble, and began idly juggling it,
making it appear double, single, treble, then single ag