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Updated: May 15, 2025
He aimed fur to break up my home and I tolled him off into Niggerwool and killed him! There's a hole in his back if you'll look fur it. I done it oh, I done it and I'll tell everything jest like it happened if you'll jest keep that thing away from me! Oh, my Lawdy! Don't you hear it? It's a-comin' clos'ter and clos'ter it's a-comin' after me!
The result was the largest lake south of the Ohio, lying mostly in Tennessee, but extending up across what is now the Kentucky line, and taking its name from a fancied resemblance in its outline to the splay, reeled foot of a cornfield negro. Niggerwool Swamp, not so far away, may have got its name from the same man who christened Reelfoot; at least so it sounds.
On one side little Niggerwool drained its saffron waters off into a sluggish creek, where summer ducks bred, and on the other it ended abruptly at a natural bank of high ground, along which the county turnpike ran. The swamp came right up to the road and thrust its fringe of reedy, weedy undergrowth forward as though in challenge to the good farm lands that were spread beyond the barrier.
But this particular buzzard now wasn't he making for Little Niggerwool? The squire did not like the idea of that. He had not thought of the buzzards until this minute.
"Right yonder, over Little Niggerwool see 'em there?" "Oh, yes," the squire made answer. "Now I see 'em. They ain't doin' nothin', I reckin jest flyin' round same as they always do in clear weather." "Must be somethin' dead over there!" speculated the man in the buggy. "A hawg probably," said the squire promptly almost too promptly. "There's likely to be hawgs usin' in Niggerwool.
The movements of ordinary, unmarked buzzards mainly concerned only those whose stock had strayed; but almost anybody with time to spare might follow this rare and famous visitor, this belled and feathered junkman of the sky. Supposing now that some one followed it today maybe followed it even to a certain thick clump of cypress in the middle of Little Niggerwool!
No living creature except himself knew of the meeting in the early morning at the head of Little Niggerwool, exactly where the squire had figured they should meet; none knew of the device by which the other man had been lured deeper and deeper in the swamp to the exact spot where the gun was hidden.
It was not the thought of that dead man lying yonder in Little Niggerwool that made him toss and fume while his wife snored gently alongside him. It was something else altogether. Finally his stirrings roused her and she asked him drowsily what ailed him. Was he sick? Or bothered about anything? Irritated, he answered her snappishly. Certainly nothing was bothering him, he told her.
There was a swamp known as Little Niggerwool, to distinguish it from Big Niggerwool, which lay across the river.
As the squire turned away from the road and headed for his house he congratulated himself upon that stroke of his in bringing in Bristow's hogs; and yet there remained this disquieting note in the situation, that buzzards flying, and especially buzzards flying over Little Niggerwool, made people curious made them ask questions.
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