White sentiment in Hooker's Bend reacted strongly on Niggertown. Peter Siner's prestige was no more. The cause of higher education for negroes took a mighty slump. Junius Gholston, a negro boy who had intended to go to Nashville to attend Fisk University, reconsidered the matter, packed away his good clothes, put on overalls, and shipped down the river as a roustabout instead.

In the Siner cabin old Caroline Siner berated her boy for his stupidity in ever trading with that low-down, twisting snake in the grass, Henry Hooker. She alternated this with floods of tears. Caroline had no sympathy for her offspring. She said she had thrown away years of self- sacrifice, years of washing, a thousand little comforts her money would have bought, all for nothing, for less than nothing, to ship a fool nigger up North and to ship him back.

Of all Niggertown, Caroline was the most unforgiving because Peter had wounded her in her pride. Every other negro in the village felt that genial satisfaction in a great man's downfall that is balm to small souls. But the old mother knew not this consolation. Peter was her proxy. It was she who had fallen.

The only person in Niggertown who continued amiable to Peter Siner was Cissie Dildine. The octoroon, perhaps, had other criteria by which to judge a man than his success or mishaps dealing with a pettifogger.

Two or three days after the catastrophe, Cissie made an excursion to the Siner cabin with a plate of cookies. Cissie was careful to place her visit on exactly a normal footing. She brought her little cakes in the role of one who saw no evil, spoke no evil, and heard no evil. But somehow Cissie's visit increased the old woman's wrath. She remained obstinately in the kitchen, and made remarks not only audible, but arresting, through the thin partition that separated it from the poor living-room.

Cissie was hardly inside when a voice stated that it hated to see a gal running after a man, trying to bait him with a lot of fum-diddles.

Cissie gave Peter a single wide-eyed glance, and then attempted to ignore the bodiless comment.

"Here are some cookies, Mr. Siner," began the girl, rather nervously. "I thought you and Ahnt Carolin'—"

"Yeah, I 'magine dey's fuh me!" jeered the spectral voice.

"Might like them," concluded the girl, with a little gasp.

"I suttinly don' want no light-fingered hussy ma'yin' my son," proceeded the voice, "an' de whole Dildine fambly 'll bear watchin'."



"Won't you have a seat?" asked Peter, exquisitely uncomfortable.

Cissie handed him her plate in confusion.

"Why, no, Mr. Siner," she hastened on, in her careful grammar, "I just— ran over to—"

"To fling herse'f in a nigger's face 'cause he's been North and got made a fool uv," boomed the hidden censor.

"I must go now," gasped Cissie.

Peter made a harried gesture.

"Wait—wait till I get my hat."

He put the plate down with a swift glance around for his hat. He found it, and strode to the door, following the girl. The two hurried out into the street, followed by indistinct strictures from the kitchen. Cissie breathed fast, with open lips. They moved rapidly along the semicircular street almost with a sense of flight. The heat of the early autumn sun stung them through their clothes. For some distance they walked in a nervous silence, then Cissie said:

"Your mother certainly hates me, Peter."

"No," said Peter, trying to soften the situation; "it's me; she's terribly hurt about—" he nodded to-ward the white section—"that business."

Cissie opened her clear brown eyes.

"Your own mother turned against you!"

"Oh, she has a right to be," began Peter, defensively. "I ought to have read that deed. It's amazing I didn't, but I—I really wasn't expecting a trick, Mr. Hooker seemed so—so sympathetic—" He came to a lame halt, staring at the dust through which they picked their way.

"Of course you weren't expecting tricks!" cried Cissie, warmly. "The whole thing shows you're a gentleman used to dealing with gentlemen. But of course these Hooker's Bend negroes will never see that!"

Peter, surprised and grateful, looked at Cissie. Her construction of the swindle was more flattering than any apology he had been able to frame for himself.

"Still, Cissie, I ought to have used the greatest care—"

"I'm not talking about what you 'ought,'" stated the octoroon, crisply; "I'm talking about what you are. When it comes to 'ought,' we colored people must get what we can, any way we can. We fight from the bottom." The speech held a viperish quality which for a moment caught the brown man's attention; then he said:

"One thing is sure, I've lost my prestige, whatever it was worth."

The girl nodded slowly.

"With the others you have, I suppose."

Peter glanced at Cissie. The temptation was strong to give the conversation a personal turn, but he continued on the general topic:

"Well, perhaps it's just as well. My prestige was a bit too flamboyant, Cissie. All I had to do was to mention a plan. The Sons and Daughters didn't even discuss it. They put it right through. That wasn't healthy. Our whole system of society, all democracies are based on discussion. Our old Witenagemot—"

"But it wasn't our old Witenagemot," said the girl.

"Well—no," admitted the mulatto, "that's true."

They moved along for some distance in silence, when the girl asked:

"What are you going to do now, Peter?"

"Teach, and keep working for that training-school," stated Peter, almost belligerently. "You didn't expect a little thing like a hundred dollars to stop me, did you?"

"No-o-o," conceded Cissie, with some reserve of judgment in her tone. Presently she added, "You could do a lot better up North, Peter."

"For whom?"

"Why, yourself," said the girl, a little surprised.

Siner nodded.

"I thought all that out before I came back here, Cissie. A friend of mine named Farquhar offered me a place with him up in Chicago,—a string of garages. You'd like Farquhar, Cissie. He's a materialist with an absolutely inexorable brain. He mechanizes the universe. I told him I couldn't take his offer. 'It's like this,' I argued: 'if every negro with a little ability leaves the South, our people down there will never progress.' It's really that way, Cissie, it takes a certain mental atmosphere to develop a people as a whole. A few individuals here and there may have the strength to spring up by themselves, but the run of the people—no. I believe one of the greatest curses of the colored race in the South is the continual draining of its best individuals North. Farquhar argued—" just then Peter saw that Cissie was not attending his discourse. She was walking at his side in a respectful silence. He stopped talking, and presently she smiled and said:

"You haven't noticed my new brooch, Peter." She lifted her hand to her bosom, and twisted the face of the trinket toward him. "You oughtn't to have made me show it to you after you recommended it yourself." She made a little moue of disappointment.

It was a pretty bit of old gold that complimented the creamy skin. Peter began admiring it at once, and, negro fashion, rather overstepped the limits white beaux set to their praise, as he leaned close to her.

At the moment the two were passing one of the oddest houses in Niggertown. It was a two-story cabin built in the shape of a steamboat. A little cupola represented a pilot-house, and two iron chimneys served for smoke-stacks.

This queer building had been built by a negro stevedore because of a deep admiration for the steamboats on which he had made his living. Instead of steps at the front door, this boat-like house had a stage- plank. As Peter strolled down the street with Cissie, admiring her brooch, and suffused with a sense of her nearness, he happened to glance up, and saw Tump Pack walk down the stage-plank, come out, and wait for them at the gate.

There was something grim in the ex-soldier's face and in the set of his gross lips as the two came up, but the aura of the girl prevented Peter from paying much attention to it. As the two reached Tump, Peter had just lifted his hand to his hat when Tump made a quick step out at the gate, in front of them, and swung a furious blow at Peter's head.

Cissie screamed. Siner staggered back with flames dancing before his eyes. The soldier lunged after his toppling man with gorilla-like blows. Hot pains shot through Peter's body. His head roared like a gong. The sunlight danced about him in flashes. The air was full of black fists smashing him, and not five feet away, the bullet head of Tump Pack bobbed this way and that in the rapid shifts of his attack. A stab of pain cut off Peter's breath. He stood with his diaphragm muscles tense and paralyzed, making convulsive efforts to breathe. At that moment he glimpsed the convexity of Tump's stomach. He drop-kicked at it with foot-ball desperation. Came a loud explosive groan. Tump seemed to rise a foot or two in air, turned over, and thudded down on his shoulders in the dust. The soldier made no attempt to rise, but curled up, twisting in agony.

Peter stood in the dust-cloud, wabbly, with roaring head. His open mouth was full of dust. Then he became aware that negroes were running in from every direction, shouting. Their voices whooped out what had happened, who it was, who had licked. Tump Pack's agonized spasms brought howls of mirth from the black fellows. Negro women were in the crowd, grinning, a little frightened, but curious. Some were in Mother-Hubbards; one had her hair half combed, one side in a kinky mattress, the other lying flat and greased down to her scalp.

When Peter gradually became able to breathe and could think at all, there was something terrible to him in Tump's silent attack and in this extravagant black mirth over mere suffering. Cissie was gone,—had fled, no doubt, at the beginning of the fight.

The prostrate man's tortured abdomen finally allowed him to twist around toward Peter. His eyes were popped, and seemed all yellows and streaked with swollen veins.

"I'll git you fuh dis," he wheezed, spitting dust "You did n' fight fair, you—"

The black chorus rolled their heads and pounded one another in a gale of merriment.

Peter Siner turned away toward his home filled with sick thought. He had never realized so clearly the open sore of Niggertown life and its great need of healing, yet this very episode would further bar him, Peter, from any constructive work. He foresaw, too plainly, how the white town and Niggertown would react to this fight. There would be no discrimination in the scandal. He, Peter Siner, would be grouped with the boot-leggers and crap-shooters and women-chasers who filled Niggertown with their brawls. As a matter of simple fact, he had been fighting with another negro over a woman. That he was subjected to an attack without warning or cause would never become a factor in the analysis. He knew that very well.

Two of Peter's teeth were loose; his left jaw was swelling; his head throbbed. With that queer perversity of human nerves, he kept biting his sore teeth together as he walked along.

When he reached home, his mother met him at the door. Thanks to the swiftness with which gossip spreads among black folk, she had already heard of the fight, and incidentally had formed her judgment of the matter. Now she looked in exasperation at her son's swelling face.

"I 'cla' 'fo' Gawd!—ain't been home a week befo' he's fightin' over a nigger wench lak a roustabout!"

Peter's head throbbed so he could hardly make out the details of Caroline's face.

"But, Mother—" he began defensively, "I—"

"Me sweatin' over de wash-pot," the negress went on, "so's you could go up North an' learn a lil sense; heah you comes back chasin' a dutty slut!"

"But, Mother," he begged thickly, "I was simply walking home with Miss Dildine."

"Miss Dildine! Miss Dildine!" exploded the ponderous woman, with an erasing gesture. "Ef you means dat stuck-up fly-by-night Cissie Dildine, say so, and don' stan' thaiuh mouthin', 'Miss Dildine, Miss Dildine'!"

"Mother," asked Peter, thickly, through his swelling mouth, "do you want to know what did happen?"

"I knows. I tol' you to keep away fum dat hussy. She's a fool 'bout her bright color an' straight hair. Needn't be givin' herse'f no airs!"

Peter stood in the doorway, steadying himself by the jamb. The world still swayed from the blows he had received on the head.

"What girl would you be willing for me to go with?" he asked in faint satire.

"Heah in Niggertown?"

Peter nodded. The movement increased his headache.

"None a-tall. No Niggertown wench a-tall. When you mus' ma'y, I's 'speckin' you to go off summuhs an' pick yo' gal, lak you went off to pick yo' aidjucation." She swung out a thick arm, and looked at Peter out of the corner of her eyes, her head tilted to one side, as negresses do when they become dramatically serious.

Peter left his mother to her stare and went to his own room. This constant implication among Niggertown inhabitants that Niggertown and all it held was worthless, mean, unhuman depressed Peter. The mulatto knew the real trouble with Niggertown was it had adopted the white village's estimate of it. The sentiment of the white village was overpowering among the imitative negroes. The black folk looked into the eyes of the whites and saw themselves reflected as chaff and skum and slime, and no human being ever suggested that they were aught else.

Peter's room was a rough shed papered with old newspapers. All sorts of yellow scare-heads streaked his walls. Hanging up was a crayon enlargement of his mother, her broad face as unwrinkled as an egg and drawn almost white, for the picture agents have discovered the only way to please their black patrons is to make their enlargements as nearly white as possible.

In one corner, on a home-made book-rack, stood Peter's library,—a Greek book or two, an old calculus, a sociology, a psychology, a philosophy, and a score of other volumes he had accumulated in his four college years. As Peter, his head aching, looked at these, he realized how immeasurably removed he was from the cool abstraction of the study.

The brown man sat down in an ancient rocking-chair by the window, leaned back, and closed his eyes. His blood still whispered in his ears from his fight. Notwithstanding his justification, he gradually became filled with self-loathing. To fight—to hammer and kick in Niggertown's dust— over a girl! It was an indignity.

Peter shifted his position in his chair, and his thoughts took another trail. Tump's attack had been sudden and silent, much like a bulldog's. The possibility of a simple friendship between a woman and a man never entered Tump's head; it never entered any Niggertown head. Here all attraction was reduced to the simplest terms of sex. Niggertown held no delicate intimacies or reserves. Two youths could not go with the same girl. Black women had no very great powers of choice over their suitors. The strength of a man's arm isolated his sweetheart. That did not seem right, resting the power of successful mating entirely upon brawn.

As Peter sat thinking it over, it came to him that the progress of any race depended, finally, upon the woman having complete power of choosing her mate. It is woman alone who consistently places the love accent upon other matters than mere flesh and muscle. Only woman has much sex selectiveness, or is inclined to select individuals with qualities of mind and spirit.

For millions of years these instinctive spiritualizers of human breeding stock have been hampered in their choice of mates by the unrestrained right of the fighting male. Indeed, the great constructive work of chivalry in the middle ages was to lay, unconsciously, the corner-stone of modern civilization by resigning to the woman the power of choosing from a group of males.

Siner stirred in his chair, surprised at whither his reverie had lead him. He wondered how he had stumbled upon these thoughts. Had he read them in a book? In point of fact, a beating administered by Tump Pack had brought the brown man the first original idea he had entertained in his life.

By this time, Peter's jaw had reached its maximum swelling and was eased somewhat. He looked out of his little window, wondering whether Cissie Dildine would choose him—or Tump Pack.

Peter was surprised to find blue dusk peering through his panes. All the scare-heads on his walls had lapsed into a common obscurity. As he rose slowly, so as not to start his head hurting again, he heard three rapid pistol shots in the cedar glade between Niggertown and the white village. He knew this to be the time-honored signal of boot-leggers announcing that illicit whisky was for sale in the blackness of the glade.



CHAPTER IV

Next day the Siner-Pack fight was the focus of news interest in Hooker's Bend. White mistresses extracted the story from their black maids, and were amused by it or deprecated Cissie Dildine's morals as the mood moved them.

Along Main Street in front of the village stores, the merchants and hangers-on discussed the affair. It was diverting that a graduate of Harvard should come back to Hooker's Bend and immediately drop into such a fracas. Old Captain Renfrew, one-time attorney at law and representative of his county in the state legislature, sat under the mulberry in front of the livery-stable and plunged into a long monologue, with old Mr. Tomwit as listener, on the uneducability of the black race.

"Take a horse, sir," expounded the captain; "a horse can be trained to add and put its name together out of an alphabet, but no horse could ever write a promissory note and figure the interest on it, sir. Take a dog. I've known dogs, sir, that could bring your mail from the post- office, but I never saw a dog stop on the way home, sir, to read a post- card."

Here the old ex-attorney spat and renewed the tobacco in a black brier, then proceeded to draw the parrallel between dogs and horses and Peter Siner newly returned from Harvard.

"God'lmighty has set his limit on dogs, horses, and niggers, Mr. Tomwit. Thus far and no farther. Take a nigger baby at birth; a nigger baby has no fontanelles. It has no window toward heaven. Its skull is sealed up in darkness. The nigger brain can never expand and absorb the universe, sir. It can never rise on the wings of genius and weigh the stars, nor compute the swing of the Pleiades. Thus far and no farther! It's congenital.

"Now, take this Peter Siner and his disgraceful fight over a nigger wench. Would you expect an educated stud horse to pay no attention to a mare, sir? You can educate a stud till—"

"But hold on!" interrupted the old cavalryman. "I've known as gentlemanly stallions as—as anybody!"

The old attorney cleared his throat, momentarily taken aback at this failure of his metaphor. However he rallied with legal suppleness:

"You are talking about thoroughbreds, sir."

"I am, sir."

"Good God, Tomwit! you don't imagine I'm comparing a nigger to a thoroughbred, sir!"

On the street corners, or piled around on cotton-bales down on the wharf, the negro men of the village discussed the fight. It was for the most part a purely technical discussion of blows and counters and kicks, and of the strange fact that a college education failed to enable Siner utterly to annihilate his adversary. Jim Pink Staggs, a dapper gentleman of ebony blackness, of pin-stripe flannels and blue serge coat— altogether a gentleman of many parts—sat on one of the bales and indolently watched an old black crone fishing from a ledge of rocks just a little way below the wharf-boat. Around Jim Pink lounged and sprawled black men and youths, stretching on the cotton-bales like cats in the sunshine.

Jim Pink was discussing Peter's education.

"I 'fo' Gawd kain't see no use goin' off lak dat an' den comin' back an' lettin' a white man cheat you out'n yo' hide an' taller, an' lettin' a black man beat you up tull you has to 'kick him in the spivit. Ef a aidjucation does you any good a-tall, you'd be boun' to beat de white man at one en' uv de line, or de black man at de udder. Ef Peter ain't to be foun' at eider en', wha is he?"

"Um-m-m!" "Eh-h-h!" "You sho spoke a moufful, Jim Pink!" came an assenting chorus from the bales.

Eventually such gossip died away and took another flurry when a report went abroad that Tump Pack was carrying a pistol and meant to shoot Peter on sight. Then this in turn ceased to be news and of human interest. It clung to Peter's mind longer than to any other person's in Hooker's Bend, and it presented to the brown man a certain problem in casuistry.

Should he accede to Tump Pack's possession of Cissie Dildine and give up seeing the girl? Such a course cut across all his fine-spun theory about women having free choice of their mates. However, the Harvard man could not advocate a socialization of courtship when he himself would be the first beneficiary. The prophet whose finger points selfward is damned. Furthermore, all Niggertown would side with Tump Pack in such a controversy. It was no uncommon thing for the very negro women to fight over their beaux and husbands. As for any social theory changing this regime, in the first place the negroes couldn't understand the theory; in the second, it would have no effect if they could. Actions never grow out of theories; theories grow out of actions. A theory is a looking- glass that reflects the past and makes it look like the future, but the glass really hides the future, and when humanity comes to a turn in its course, there is always a smash-up, and a blind groping for the lost path.

Now, in regard to Cissie Dildine, Peter was not precisely afraid of Tump Pack, but he could not clear his mind of the fact that Tump had been presented with a medal by the Congress of the United States for killing four men. Good sense and a care for his reputation and his skin told Peter to abandon his theory of free courtship for the time being. This meant a renunciation of Cissie Dildine; but he told himself he renounced very little. He had no reason to think that Cissie cared a picayune about him.

Peter's work kept him indoors for a number of days following the encounter. He was reviewing some primary school work in order to pass a teacher's examination that would be held in Jonesboro, the county seat, in about three weeks.

To the uninitiated it may seem strange to behold a Harvard graduate stuck down day after day poring over a pile of dog-eared school-books— third arithmetics, primary grammars, beginners' histories of Tennessee, of the United States, of England; physiology, hygiene. It may seem queer. But when it comes to standing a Wayne County teacher's examination, the specific answers to the specific questions on a dozen old examination slips are worth all the degrees Harvard ever did confer.

So, in his newspapered study, Peter Siner looked up long lists of questions, and attempted to memorize the answers. But the series of missteps he had made since returning to Hooker's Bend besieged his brain and drew his thoughts from his catechism. It seemed strange that in so short a time he should have wandered so far from the course he had set for himself. His career in Niggertown formed a record of slight mistakes, but they were not to be undone, and their combined force had swung him a long way from the course he had plotted for himself. There was no way to explain. Hooker's Bend would judge him by the sheer surface of his works. What he had meant to do, his dreams and altruisms, they would never surmise. That was the irony of the thing.

Then he thought of Cissie Dildine who did understand him. This thought might have been Cissie's cue to enter the stage of Peter's mind. Her oval, creamy face floated between Peter's eyes and the dog-eared primer. He thought of Cissie wistfully, and of her lonely fight for good English, good manners, and good taste. There was a pathos about Cissie.

Peter got up from his chair and looked out at his high window into the early afternoon. He had been poring over primers for three days, stuffing the most heterogeneous facts. His head felt thick and slightly feverish. Through his window he saw the side of another negro cabin, but by looking at an angle eastward he could see a field yellow with corn, a valley, and, beyond, a hill wooded and glowing with the pageantry of autumn. He thought of Cissie Dildine again, of walking with her among the burning maples and the golden elms. He thought of the restfulness such a walk with Cissie would bring.

As he mused, Peter's soul made one of those sharp liberating movements that occasionally visit a human being. The danger of Tump Pack's jealousy, the loss of his prestige, the necessity of learning the specific answers to the examination questions, all dropped away from him as trivial and inconsequent. He turned from the window, put away his books and question-slips, picked up his hat, and moved out briskly through his mother's room toward the door.

The old woman in the kitchen must have heard him, for she called to him through the partition, and a moment later her bulky form filled the kitchen entrance. She wiped her hands on her apron and looked at him accusingly.

"Wha you gwine, son?"

"For a walk."

The old negress tilted her head aslant and looked fixedly at him.

"You's gwine to dat Cissie Dildine's, Peter."

Peter looked at his mother, surprised and rather disconcerted that she had guessed his intentions from his mere footsteps. The young man changed his plans for his walk, and began a diplomatic denial:

"No, I'm going to walk by myself. I'm tired; I'm played out."

"Tired?" repeated his mother, doubtfully. "You ain't done nothin' but set an' turn th'ugh books an' write on a lil piece o' paper."

Peter was vaguely amused in his weariness, but thought that he concealed his mirth from his mother.

"That gets tiresome after a while."

She grunted her skepticism. As Peter moved for the door she warned him:

"Peter, you knows ef Tump Pack sees you, he's gwine to shoot you sho!"

"Oh, no he won't; that's Tump's talk."

"Talk! talk! Whut's matter wid you, Peter? Dat nigger done git crowned fuh killin' fo' men!" She stood staring at him with white eyes. Then she urged, "Now, look heah, Peter, come along an' eat yo' supper."

"No, I really need a walk. I won't walk through Niggertown. I'll walk out in the woods."

"I jes made some salmon coquettes fuh you whut'll spile ef you don' eat 'em now."

"I didn't know you were making croquettes," said Peter, with polite interest.

"Well, I is. I gotta can o' salmon fum Miss Mollie Brownell she'd opened an' couldn't quite use. I doctered 'em up wid a lil vinegar an' sody, an' dey is 'bout as pink as dey ever wuz."

A certain uneasiness and annoyance came over Peter at this persistent use of unwholesome foods.

"Look here, Mother, you're not using old canned goods that have been left over?"

The old negress stood looking at him in silence, but lost her coaxing expression.

"I've told and told you about using any tainted or impure foods that the white people can't eat."

"Well, whut ef you is?"

"If it's too bad for them, it's too bad for you!"

Caroline made a careless gesture.

"Good Lawd, boy! I don' 'speck to eat whut's good fuh me! All I says is, 'Grub, keep me alive. Ef you do dat, you done a good day's wuck.'"

Peter was disgusted and shocked at his mother's flippancy. Modern colleges are atheistic, but they do exalt three gods,—food, cleanliness, and exercise. Now here was Peter's mother blaspheming one of his trinity.

"I wish you 'd let me know when you want anything Mother. I'll get it fresh for you." His words were filial enough, but his tone carried his irritation.

The old negress turned back to the kitchen.

"Huh, boy! you been fotch up on lef'-overs," she said, and disappeared through the door.

Peter walked to the gate, let himself out, and started off on his constitutional. His tiff with his mother renewed all his nervousness and sense of failure. His litany of mistakes renewed their dolor in his mind.

An autumn wind was blowing, and long plumes of dust whisked up out of the curving street and swept over the ill-kept yards, past the cabins, and toward the sere fields and chromatic woods. The wind beat at the brown man; the dust whispered against his clothes, made him squint his eyes to a crack and tickled his nostrils at each breath.

When Peter had gone two or three hundred yards, he became aware that somebody was walking immediately behind him. Tump Pack popped into his mind. He looked over his shoulder and then turned. Through the veils of flying dust he made out some one, and a moment later identified not Tump Pack, but the gangling form of Jim Pink Staggs, clad in a dark-blue sack-coat and white flannel trousers with pin stripes. It was the sort of costume affected by interlocutors of minstrel shows; it had a minstrel trigness about it.

As a matter of fact, Jim Pink was a sort of semi-professional minstrel. Ordinarily, he ran a pressing-shop in the Niggertown crescent, but occasionally he impressed all the dramatic talent of Niggertown and really did take the road with a minstrel company. These barn-storming expeditions reached down into Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Sometimes they proved a great success, and the darkies rode back several hundred dollars ahead. Sometimes they tramped back.

Jim Pink hailed Peter with a wave of his hand and a grotesque displacement of his mouth to one side of his face, which he had found effective in his minstrel buffoonery.

"Whut you raisin' so much dus' about?" he called out of the corner of his mouth, while looking at Peter out of one half-closed eye.

Peter shook his head and smiled.

"Thought it mout be Mister Hooker deliverin' dat lan' you bought." Jim Pink flung his long, flexible face into an imitation of convulsed laughter, then next moment dropped it into an intense gravity and declared, "'Dus' thou art, to dus' returnest.'" The quotation seemed fruitless and silly enough, but Jim Pink tucked his head to one side as if listening intently to himself, then repeated sepulchrally, "'Dus' thou art, to dus' returnest.' By the way, Peter," he broke off cheerily, "you ain't happen to see Tump Pack, is you?"

"No," said Peter, unamused.

"Is he borrowed a gun fum you?" inquired the minstrel, solemnly.

"No-o." Peter looked questioningly at the clown through half-closed eyes.

"Huh, now dat's funny." Jim Pink frowned, and pulled down his loose mouth and seemed to study. He drew out a pearl-handled knife, closed his hand over it, blew on his fist, then opened the other hand, and exhibited the knife lying in its palm, with the blade open. He seemed surprised at the change and began cleaning his finger-nails. Jim Pink was the magician at his shows.

Peter waited patiently for Jim Pink to impart his information, "Well, what's the idea?" he asked at last.

"Don' know. 'Pears lak dat knife won't stay in any one han'." He looked at it, curiously.

"I mean about Tump," said Peter, impatiently.

"O-o-oh, yeah; you mean 'bout Tump. Well, I thought Tump mus' uv borrowed a gun fum you. He lef' Hobbett's corner wid a great big forty- fo', inquirin' wha you is." Just then he glanced up, looked penetratingly through the dust-cloud, and added, "Why, I b'lieve da' 's Tump now."

With a certain tightening of the nerves, Peter followed his glance, but made out nothing through the fogging dust. When he looked around at Jim Pink again, the buffoon's face was a caricature of immense mirth. He shook it sober, abruptly, minstrel fashion.

"Maybe I's mistooken," he said solemnly. "Tump did start over heah wid a gun, but Mister Dawson Bobbs done tuk him up fuh ca'yin' concealed squidjulums; so Tump's done los' dat freedom uv motion in de pu'suit uv happiness gua'anteed us niggers an' white folks by the Constitution uv de Newnighted States uv America." Here Jim Pink broke into genuine laughter, which was quite a different thing from his stage grimaces. Peter stared at the fool astonished.

"Has he gone to jail?"

"Not prezactly."

"Well—confound it!—exactly what did happen, Jim Pink?"

"He gone to Mr. Cicero Throgmartins'."

"What did he go there for?"

"Couldn't he'p hisse'f."

"Look here, you tell me what's happened."

"Mr. Bobbs ca'ied Tump thaiuh. Y' see, Mr. Throgmartin tried to hire Tump to pick cotton. Tump didn't haf to, because he'd jes shot fo' natchels in a crap game. So to-day, when Tump starts over heah wid his gun, Mr. Bobbs 'resses Tump. Mr. Throgmartin bails him out, so now Tump's gone to pick cotton fuh Mr. Throgmartin to pay off'n his fine." Here Jim Pink yelped into honest laughter at Tump's undoing so that dust got into his nose and mouth and set him sneezing and coughing.

"How long's he up for?" asked Peter, astonished and immensely relieved at this outcome of Tump's expedition against himself.

Jim Pink controlled his coughing long enough to gasp:

"Th-thutty days, ef he don' run off," and fell to laughing again.

Peter Siner, long before, had adopted the literate man's notion of what is humorous, and Tump's mishap was slap-stick to him. Nevertheless, he did smile. The incident filled him with extraordinary relief and buoyancy. At the next corner he made some excuse to Jim Pink, and turned off up an alley.

* * * * *

Peter walked along with his shoulders squared and the dust peppering his back. Not till Tump was lifted from his mind did he realize what an incubus the soldier had been. Peter had been forced into a position where, if he had killed Tump, he would have been ruined; if he had not, he would probably have murdered. Now he was free—for thirty days.

He swung along briskly in the warm sunshine toward the multicolored forest. The day had suddenly become glorious. Presently he found himself in the back alleys near Cissie's house. He was passing chicken-houses and stables. Hogs in open pens grunted expectantly at his footsteps.

Peter had not meant to go to Cissie's at all, but now, when he saw he was right behind her dwelling, she seemed radiantly accessible to him. Still, it struck him that it would not be precisely the thing to call on Cissie immediately after Tump's arrest. It might look as if—Then the thought came that, as a neighbor, he should stop and tell Cissie of Tump's misfortune. He really ought to offer his services to Cissie, if he could do anything. At Cissie's request he might even aid Tump Pack himself. Peter got himself into a generous glow as he charged up a side alley, around to a rickety front gate. Let Niggertown criticize as it would, he was braced by a high altruism.

Peter did not shout from the gate, as is the fashion of the crescent, but walked up a little graveled path lined with dusty box-shrubs and tapped at the unpainted door.

Doors in Niggertown never open straight away to visitors. A covert inspection first takes place from the edges of the window-blinds.

Peter stood in the whipping dust, and the caution of the inmates spurred his impatience to see Cissie. At last the door opened, and Cissie herself was in the entrance. She stood quite still a moment, looking at Peter with eyes that appeared frightened.

"I—I wasn't expecting to see you," she stammered.

"No? I came by with news, Cissie."

"News?" She seemed more frightened than ever. "Peter, you—you haven't— " She paused, regarding him with big eyes.

"Tump Pack's been arrested," explained Peter, quickly, sensing the tragedy in her thoughts. "I came by to tell you. If there's anything I can do for you—or him, I'll do it."

His altruistic offer sounded rather foolish in the actual saying.

He could not tell from her face whether she was glad or sorry.

"What did they arrest him for?"

"Carrying a pistol."

She paused a moment.

"Will he—get out soon?"

"He's sentenced for thirty days."

Cissie dropped her hands with a hopeless gesture.

"Oh, isn't this all sickening!—sickening!" she exclaimed. She looked tired. Ghosts of sleepless nights circled her eyes. Suddenly she said, "Come in. Oh, do come in, Peter." She reached out and almost pulled him in. She was so urgent that Peter might have fancied Tump Pack at the gate with his automatic. He did glance around, but saw nobody passing except the Arkwright boy. The hobbledehoy walked down the other side of the street, hands thrust in pockets, with the usual discontented expression on his face.

Cissie slammed the door shut, and the two stood rather at a loss in the sudden gloom of the hall. Cissie broke into a brief, mirthless laugh.

"Peter, it's hard to be nice in Niggertown. I—I just happened to think how folks would gossip—you coming here as soon as Tump was arrested."

"Perhaps I'd better go," suggested Peter, uncomfortably.

Cissie reached up and caught his lapel.

"Oh, no, don't feel that way! I'm glad you came, really. Here, let's go through this way to the arbor. It isn't a bad place to sit."

She led the way silently through two dark rooms. Before she opened the back door, Peter could hear Cissie's mother and a younger sister moving around the outside of the house to give up the arbor to Cissie and her company.

The arbor proved a trellis of honeysuckle over the back door, with a bench under it. A film of dust lay over the dense foliage, and a few withered blooms pricked its grayish green. The earthen floor of the arbor was beaten hard and bare by the naked feet of children.

Cissie sat down on the bench and indicated a place beside her.

"I've been so uneasy about you! I've been wondering what on earth you could do about it."

"It's a snarl, all right," he said, and almost immediately began discussing the peculiar impasse in which his difficulty with Tump had landed him. Cissie sat listening with a serious, almost tragic face, giving a little nod now and then. Once she remarked in her precise way:

"The trouble with a gentleman fighting a rowdy, the gentleman has all to lose and nothing to gain. If you don't live among your own class, Peter, your life will simmer down to an endless diplomacy."

"You mean deceit, I suppose."

"No, I mean diplomacy. But that isn't a very healthy frame of mind,— always to be suppressing and guarding yourself."

Peter didn't know about that. He was inclined to argue the matter, but Cissie wouldn't argue. She seemed to assume that all of her statements were axioms, truths reduced to the simplest possible mental terms, and that proof was unnecessary, if not impossible. So the topic went into the discard.

"Been baking my brains over a lot of silly little exam questions," complained Peter. "Can you trace the circulation of the blood? I think it leaves the grand central station through the right aorta, and then, after a schedule run of nine minutes, you can hear it coming up the track through the left ventricle, with all the passengers eager to get off and take some refreshment at the lungs. I have the general idea, but the exact routing gets me."

Cissie laughed accommodatingly.

"I wonder why it's necessary for everybody to know that once. I did. I could follow the circulation the right way or backward."

"Must have been harder backward, going against the current."

Cissie laughed again. A girl's part in a witty conversation might seem easy at first sight. She has only to laugh at the proper intervals. However, these intervals are not always distinctly marked. Some girls take no chances and laugh all the time.

Cissie's appreciation was the sedative Peter needed. The relief of her laughter and her presence ran along his nerves and unkinked them, like a draft of Kentucky Special after a debauch. The curves of her cheek, the tilt of her head, and the lift of her dull-blue blouse at the bosom wove a great restfulness about Peter. The brooch of old gold glinted at her throat. The heavy screen of the arbor gave them a sweet sense of privacy. The conversation meandered this way and that, and became quite secondary to the feeling of the girl's nearness and sympathy. Their talk drifted back to Peter's mission here in Hooker's Bend, and Cissie was saying:

"The trouble is, Peter, we are out of our milieu." Some portion of Peter's brain that was not basking in the warmth and invitation of the girl answered quite logically:

"Yes, but if I could help these people, Cissie, reconstruct our life here culturally—"

Cissie shook her head. "Not culturally."

This opposition shunted more of Peter's thought to the topic in hand. He paused interrogatively.

"Racially," said Cissie.

"Racially?" repeated the man, quite lost.

Cissie nodded, looking straight into his eyes. "You know very well, Peter, that you and I are not—are not anything near full bloods. You know that racially we don't belong in—Niggertown."

Peter never knew exactly how this extraordinary sentence had come about, but in a kind of breath he realized that he and this almost white girl were not of Niggertown. No doubt she had been arguing that he, Peter, who was one sort of man, was trying to lead quite another sort of men moved by different racial impulses, and such leading could only come to confusion. He saw the implications at once.

It was an extraordinary idea, an explosive idea, such as Cissie seemed to have the faculty of touching off. He sat staring at her.

It was the white blood in his own veins that had sent him struggling up North, that had brought him back with this flame in his heart for his own people. It was the white blood in Cissie that kept her struggling to stand up, to speak an unbroken tongue, to gather around her the delicate atmosphere and charm of a gentlewoman. It was the Caucasian in them buried here in Niggertown. It was their part of the tragedy of millions of mixed blood in the South. Their common problem, a feeling of their joint isolation, brought Peter to a sense of keen and tingling nearness to the girl.

She was talking again, very earnestly, almost tremulously:

"Why don't you go North, Peter? I think and think about you staying here. You simply can't grow up and develop here. And now, especially, when everybody doubts you. If you'd go North—"

"What about you, Cissie? You say we're together—"

"Oh, I'm a woman. We haven't the chance to do as we will."

A kind of titillation went over Peter's scalp and body.

"Then you are going to stay here and marry—Tump?" He uttered the name in a queer voice.

Tears started in Cissie's eyes; her bosom lifted to her quick breathing.

"I—I don't know what I'm going to do," she stammered miserably.

Peter leaned over her with a drumming heart; he heard her catch her breath.

"You don't care for Tump?" he asked with a dry mouth.

She gasped out something, and the next moment Peter felt her body sink limply in his groping arms. They clung together closely, quiveringly. Three nights of vigil, each thinking miserably and wistfully of the other, had worn the nerves of both man and girl until they were ready to melt together at a touch. Her soft body clinging to his own, the little nervous pressures of her arms, her eased breathing at his neck, wiped away Siner's long sense of strain. Strength and peace seemed to pour from her being into his by a sort of spiritual osmosis. She resigned her head to his palm in order that he might lift her lips to his when he pleased. After all, there is no way for a man to rest without a woman. All he can do is to stop work.

For a long time they sat transported amid the dusty honeysuckles and withered blooms, but after a while they began talking a little at a time of the future, their future. They felt so indissolubly joined that they could not imagine the future finding them apart. There was no need for any more trouble with Tump Pack. They would marry quietly, and go away North to live. Peter thought of his friend Farquhar. He wondered if Farquhar's attitude would be just the same toward Cissie as it was toward him.

"North," was the burden of the octoroon's dreams. They would go North to Chicago. There were two hundred and fifty thousand negroes in Chicago, a city within itself three times the size of Nashville. Up North she and Peter could go to theaters, art galleries, could enter any church, could ride in street-cars, railroad-trains, could sleep and eat at any hotel, live authentic lives.

It was Cissie planning her emancipation, planning to escape her lifelong disabilities.

"Oh, I'll be so glad! so glad! so glad!" she sobbed, and drew Peter's head passionately down to her deep bosom.



CHAPTER V

Peter Siner walked home from the Dildine cabin that night rather dreading to meet his mother, for it was late. Cissie had served sandwiches and coffee on a little table in the arbor, and then had kept Peter hours afterward. Around him still hung the glamour of Cissie's little supper. He could still see her rounded elbows that bent softly backward when she extended an arm, and the glimpses of her bosom when she leaned to hand him cream or sugar. She had accomplished the whole supper in the white manner, with all poise and daintiness. In fact, no one is more exquisitely polite than an octoroon woman when she desires to be polite, when she elevates the subserviency of her race into graciousness.

However, the pleasure and charm of Cissie were fading under the approaching abuse that Caroline was sure to pour upon the girl. Peter dreaded it. He walked slowly down the dark semicircle, planning how he could best break to his mother the news of his engagement. Peter knew she would begin a long bill of complaints,—how badly she was treated, how she had sacrificed herself, her comfort, how she had washed and scrubbed. She would surely charge Cissie with being a thief and a drab, and all the announcements of engagements that Peter could make would never induce the old woman to soften her abuse. Indeed, they would make her worse.

So Peter walked on slowly, smelling the haze of dust that hung in the blackness. Out on the Big Hill, in the glade, Peter caught an occasional glimmer of light where crap-shooters and boot-leggers were beginning their nightly carousal.

These evidences of illicit trades brought Peter a thrill of disgust. In a sort of clear moment he saw that he could not keep Cissie in such a sty as this. He could not rear in such a place as this any children that might come to him and Cissie. His thoughts drifted back to his mother, and his dread of her tongue.

The Siner cabin was dark and tightly shut when Peter let himself in at the gate and walked to the door. He stood a moment listening, and then gently pressed open the shutter. A faint light burned on the inside, a night-lamp with an old-fashioned brass bowl. It sat on the floor, turned low, at the foot of his mother's bed. The mean room was mainly in shadow. The old-style four-poster in which Caroline slept was an indistinct mound. The air was close and foul with the bad ventilation of all negro sleeping-rooms. The brass lamp, turned low, added smoke and gas to the tight quarters.

The odor caught Peter in the nose and throat, and once more stirred up his impatience with his mother's disregard of hygiene. He tiptoed into the room and decided to remove the lamp and open the high, small window to admit a little air. He moved noiselessly and had stooped for the lamp when there came a creaking and a heavy sigh from the bed, and the old negress asked:

"Is dat you, son?"

Peter was tempted to stand perfectly still and wait till his mother dozed again, thus putting off her inevitable tirade against Cissie; but he answered in a low tone that it was he.

"Whut you gwine do wid dat lamp, son?"

"Go to bed by it, Mother."

"Well, bring hit back." She breathed heavily, and moved restlessly in the old four-poster. As Peter stood up he saw that the patched quilts were all askew over her shapeless bulk. Evidently, she had not been resting well.

Peter's conscience smote him again for worrying his mother with his courtship of Cissie, yet what could he do? If he had wooed any other girl in the world, she would have been equally jealous and grieved. It was inevitable that she should be disappointed and bitter; it was bound up in the very part and parcel of her sacrifice. A great sadness came over Peter. He almost wished his mother would berate him, but she continued to lie there, breathing heavily under her disarranged covers. As Peter passed into his room, the old negress called after him to remind him to bring the light back when he was through with it.

This time something in her tone alarmed Peter. He paused in the doorway.

"Are you sick, Mother?" he asked.

The old woman gave a yawn that changed to a groan.

"I—I ain't feelin' so good."

"What's the matter, Mother?"

"My stomach, my—" But at that moment her sentence changed to an inarticulate sound, and she doubled up in bed as if caught in a spasm of acute agony.

Peter hurried to her, thoroughly frightened, and saw sweat streaming down her face. He stared down at her.

"Mother, you are sick! What can I do?" he cried, with a man's helplessness.

She opened her eyes with an effort, panting now as the edge of the agony passed. There was a movement under the quilts, and she thrust out a rubber hot-water bottle.

"Fill it—fum de kittle," she wheezed out, then relaxed into groans, and wiped clumsily at the sweat on her shining black face.

Peter seized the bottle and ran into the kitchen. There he found a brisk fire popping in the stove and a kettle of water boiling. It showed him, to his further alarm, that his mother had been trying to minister to herself until forced to bed.

The man scalded a finger and thumb pouring water into the flared mouth, but after a moment twisted on the top and hurried into the sick-room.

He reached the old negress just as another knife of pain set her writhing and sweating. She seized the hot-water bottle, pushed it under the quilts, and pressed it to her stomach, then lay with eyes and teeth clenched tight, and her thick lips curled in a grin of agony.

Peter set the lamp on the table, said he was going for the doctor, and started.

The old woman hunched up in bed. With the penuriousness of her station and sacrifices, she begged Peter not to go; then groaned out, "Go tell Mars' Renfrew," but the next moment did not want Peter to leave her.

Peter said he would get Nan Berry to stay while he was gone. The Berry cabin lay diagonally across the street. Peter ran over, thumped on the door, and shouted his mother's needs. As soon as he received an answer, he started on over the Big Hill toward the white town.

Peter was seriously frightened. His run to Dr. Jallup's, across the Big Hill, was a series of renewed strivings for speed. Every segment of his journey seemed to seize him and pin him down in the midst of the night like a bug caught in a black jelly. He seemed to progress not at all.

Now he was in the cedar glade. His muffled flight drove in the sentries of the crap-shooters, and gamesters blinked out their lights and listened to his feet stumbling on through the darkness.

After an endless run in the glade, Peter found himself on top of the hill, amid boulders and outcrops limestone and cedar-shrubs. His flash- light picked out these objects, limned them sharply against the blackness, then dropped them into obscurity again.

He tried to run faster. His impatience subdivided the distance into yards and feet. Now he was approaching that boulder, now he was passing it; now he was ten feet beyond, twenty, thirty. Perhaps his mother was dying, alone save for stupid Nan Berry.

Now he was going down the hill past the white church. All that was visible was its black spire set against a web of stars. He was making no speed at all. He panted on. His heart hammered. His legs drummed with Lilliputian paces. Now he was among the village stores, all utterly black. At one point the echo of his feet chattered back at him, as if some other futile runner strained amid vast spaces of blackness.

After a long time he found himself running up a residential street, and presently, far ahead, he saw the glow of Dr. Jallup's porch light. Its beam had the appearance of coming from a vast distance. When he reached the place, he flung his breast against the top panel of the doctor's fence and held on, exhausted. He drew in his breath, and began shouting, "Hello, Doctor!"

Peter called persistently, and as he commanded more breath, he called louder and louder, "Hello, Doctor! Hello, Doctor! Hello, Doctor!" in tones edging on panic.

The doctor's house might have been dead. Somewhere a dog began barking. High in the Southern sky a star looked down remotely on Peter's frantic haste. The black man stood in the black night with cries: "Hello, Doctor! Hello, Doctor! Hello, Doctor!"

At last, in despair, he tried to think of other doctors. He thought of telephoning to Jonesboro. Just as he decided he must turn away there came a stirring in the dead house, a flicker of light appeared on the inside now here, now there; it steadied into a tiny beam and approached the door. The door opened, and Dr. Jallup's head and breast appeared, illuminated against the black interior.

"My mother's sick, Doctor," began Peter, in immense relief.

"Who is it?" inquired the half-clad man, impassively.

"Caroline Siner; she's been taken with a—"

The physician lifted his light a trifle in an effort to see Peter.

"Lemme see: she's that fat nigger woman that lives in a three-roomed house—"

"I'll show you the way," said Peter. "She's very ill."

The half-dressed man shook his head.

"No, Ca'line Siner owes me a five-dollar doctor's bill already. Our county medical association made a rule that no niggers should—"

With a drying mouth, Peter Siner stared at the man of medicine.

"But, my God, Doctor," gasped the son, "I'll pay you—"

"Have you got the money there in your pocket?" asked Jallup, impassively.

A sort of chill traveled deliberately over Peter's body and shook his voice.

"N-no, but I can get it—"

"Yes, you can all get it," stated the physician in dull irritation. "I'm tired of you niggers running up doctors' bills nobody can collect. You never have more than the law allows; your wages never get big enough to garnishee." His voice grew querulous as he related his wrongs. "No, I'm not going to see Ca'line Siner. If she wants me to visit her, let her send ten dollars to cover that and back debts, and I'll—" The end of his sentence was lost in the closing of his door. The light he carried declined from a beam to a twinkling here and there, and then vanished in blackness. Dr. Jallup's house became dead again. The little porch light in its glass box might have been a candle burning before a tomb.

Peter Siner stood at the fence, licking his dry lips, with nerves vibrating like a struck bell. He pushed himself slowly away from the top plank and found his legs so weak that he could hardly walk. He moved slowly, back down the unseen street. The dog he had disturbed gave a few last growls and settled into silence.

Peter moved along, wetting his dry lips, and stirring feebly among his dazed thoughts, hunting some other plan of action. There was a tiny burning spot on the left side of his occiput. It felt like a heated cambric needle which had been slipped into his scalp. Then he realized that he must go home, get ten dollars, and bring them back to Dr. Jallup. He started to run, but almost toppled over on his leaden legs.

He plodded through the darkness, retracing the endless trail to Niggertown. As he passed a dark mass of shrubbery and trees, he recalled his mother's advice to ask aid of Captain Renfrew. It was the old Renfrew place that Peter was passing.

The negro hesitated, then turned in at the gate in the bare hope of obtaining the ten dollars at once. Inside the gate Peter's feet encountered the scattered bricks of an old walk. The negro stood and called Captain Renfrew's name in a guarded voice. He was not at all sure of his action.

Peter had called twice and was just about to go when a lamp appeared around the side of the house on a long portico that extended clear around the building. Bathed in the light of the lamp which he held over his head, there appeared an old man wearing a worn dressing gown.

"Who is it?" he asked in a wavery voice.

Peter told his name and mission.

The old Captain continued holding up his light.

"Oh, Peter Siner; Caroline Siner's sick? All right I'll have Jallup run over; I'll phone him."

Peter was beginning his thanks preparatory to going, when the old man interrupted.

"No, just stay here until Jallup comes by in his or He'll pick us both up. It'll save time. Come on inside. What's the matter with old Caroline?"

The old dressing-gown led the way around the continuous piazza, to a room that stood open and brightly lighted on the north face of the old house.

A great relief came to Peter at this unexpected succor. He followed around the piazza, trying to describe Caroline's symptoms. The room Peter entered was a library, a rather stately old room, lined with books all around the walls to about as high as a man could reach. Spaces for doors and windows were let in among the book-cases. The volumes themselves seemed composed mainly of histories and old-fashioned scientific books, if Peter could judge from a certain severity of their bindings. On a big library table burned a gasolene-lamp, which threw a brilliant whiteness all over the room. The table was piled with books and periodicals. Books and papers were heaped on every chair in the study except a deep Morris chair in which the old Captain had been sitting. A big meridional globe, about two and a half feet in diameter, gleamed through a film of dust in the embrasure of a window. The whole room had the womanless look of a bachelor's quarters, and was flavored with tobacco and just a hint of whisky.

Old Captain Renfrew evidently had been reading when Peter called from the gate. Now the old man went to a telephone and rang long and briskly to awaken the boy who slept in the central office. Peter fidgeted as the old Captain stood with receiver to ear.

"Hard to wake." The old gentleman spoke into the transmitter, but was talking to Peter. "Don't be so uneasy, Peter. Human beings are harder to kill than you think."

There was a kindliness, even a fellowship, in Captain Renfrew's tones that spread like oil over Peter's raw nerves. It occurred to the negro that this was the first time he had been addressed as an authentic human being since his conversation with the two Northern men on the Pullman, up in Illinois. It surprised him. It was sufficient to take his mind momentarily from his mother. He looked a little closely at the old man at the telephone. The Captain wore few indices of kindness. Lines of settled sarcasm netted his eyes and drooped away from his old mouth. The very swell of his full temples and their crinkly veins marked a sardonic old man.

At last he roused central over the wire, and impressed upon him the necessity of creating a stridor in Dr. Jallup's dead house, and a moment later a continued buzzing in the receiver betokened the operator's efforts to do so.

The old gentleman turned around at last, holding the receiver a little distance from his ear.

"I understand you went to Harvard, Peter."

"Yes, sir." Peter took his eyes momentarily from the telephone. The old Southerner in the dressing-gown scrutinized the brown man. He cleared his throat.

"You know, Peter, it gives me a—a certain satisfaction to see a Harvard man in Hooker's Bend. I'm a Harvard man myself."

Peter stood in the brilliant light, astonished, not at Captain Renfrew's being a Harvard man,—he had known that,—but that this old gentleman was telling the fact to him, Peter Siner, a negro graduate of Harvard.

It was extraordinary; it was tantamount to an offer of friendship, not patronage. Such an offer in the South disturbed Peter's poise; it touched him queerly. And it seemed to explain why Captain Renfrew had received Peter so graciously and was now arranging for Dr. Jallup to visit Caroline.

Peter was moved to the conventional query, asking in what class the Captain had been graduated. But while his very voice was asking it, Peter thought what a strange thing it was that he, Peter Siner, a negro, and this lonely old gentleman, his benefactor, were spiritual brothers, both sprung from the loins of Harvard, that ancient mother of souls.



From the darkness outside, Dr. Jallup's horn summmoned the two men. Captain Renfrew got out of his gown and into his coat and turned off his gasolene light. They walked around the piazza to the front of the house. In the street the head-lights of the roadster shot divergent rays through the darkness. They went out. The old Captain took a seat in the car beside the physician, while Peter stood on the running-board. A moment later, the clutch snarled, and the machine puttered down the street. Peter clung to the standards of the auto top, peering ahead.

The men remained almost silent. Once Dr. Jallup, watching the dust that lay modeled in sharp lights and shadows under the head-lights, mentioned lack of rain. Their route did not lead over the Big Hill. They turned north at Hobbett's corner, drove around by River Street, and presently entered the northern end of the semicircle.

The speed of the car was reduced to a crawl in the bottomless dust of the crescent. The head-lights swept slowly around the cabins on the concave side of the street, bringing them one by one into stark brilliance and dropping them into obscurity. The smell of refuse, of uncleaned stables and sties and outhouses hung in the darkness. Peter bent down under the top of the motor and pointed out his place. A minute later the machine came to a noisy halt and was choked into silence. At that moment, in the sweep of the head-light, Peter saw Viny Berry, one of Nan's younger sisters, coming up from Niggertown's public well, carrying two buckets of water.

Viny was hurrying, plashing the water over the sides of her buckets. The importance of her mission was written in her black face.

"She's awful thirsty," she called to Peter in guarded tones. "Nan called me to fetch some fraish water fum de well."

Peter took the water that had been brought from the semi-cesspool at the end of the street. Viny hurried across the street to home and to bed. With the habitual twinge of his sanitary conscience, Peter considered the water in the buckets.

"We'll have to boil this," he said to the doctor.

"Boil it?" repeated Jallup, blankly. Then, he added: "Oh, yes—boil. Certainly."

* * * * *

A repellent odor of burned paper, breathed air, and smoky lights filled the close room. Nan had lighted another lamp and now the place was discernible in a dull yellow glow. In the corner lay a half-burned wisp of paper. Nan herself stood by the mound on the bed, putting straight the quilts that her patient had twisted awry.

"She sho am bad, Doctor," said the colored woman, with big eyes.

Seen in the light, Dr. Jallup was a little sandy-bearded man with a round, simple face, oddly overlaid with that inscrutability carefully cultivated by country doctors. With professional cheeriness, he approached the mound of bedclothes.

"A little under the weather, Aunt Ca'line?" He slipped his fingers alongside her throat to test her temperature, at the same time drawing a thermometer from his waistcoat pocket.

The old negress stirred, and looked up out of sick eyes.

"Doctor," she gasped, "I sho got a misery heah." She indicated her stomach.

"How do you feel?" he asked hopefully.

The woman panted, then whispered:

"Lak a knife was a-cuttin' an' a-tearin' out my innards." She rested, then added, "Not so bad now; feels mo' lak somp'n's tearin' in de nex' room."

"Like something tearing in the next room?" repeated Jallup, emptily.

"Yes, suh," she whispered. "I jes can feel hit—away off, lak."

The doctor attempted to take her temperature, but the thermometer in her mouth immediately nauseated her, so he slipped the instrument under her arm.

Old Caroline groaned at the slightest exertion, then, as she tossed her black head, she caught a glimpse of old Captain Renfrew.

She halted abruptly in her restlessness, stared at the old gentleman, wet her dry lips with a queer brown-furred tongue.

"Is dat you, Mars' Milt?" she gasped in feeble astonishment. A moment later she guessed the truth. "I s'pose you had to bring de doctor. 'Fo' Gawd, Mars' Milt—" She lay staring, with the covers rising and falling as she gasped for breath. Her feverish eyes shifted back and forth between the grim old gentleman and the tall, broad-shouldered brown man at the foot of her bed. She drew a baggy black arm from under the cover.

"Da' 's Peter, Mars' Milt," she pointed. "Da' 's Peter, my son. He—he use' to be my son 'fo' he went off to school; but sence he come home, he been a-laughin' at me." Tears came to her eyes; she panted for a moment, then added: "Yeah, he done marked his mammy down fuh a nigger, Mars' Milt. Whut I thought wuz gwine be sweet lays bitter in my mouf." She worked her thick lips as if the rank taste of her sickness were the very flavor of her son's ingratitude.

A sudden gasp and twist of her body told Nan that the old woman was again seized with a spasm. The neighbor woman took swift control, and waved out Peter and old Mr. Renfrew, while she and the doctor aided the huge negress.

The two evicted men went into Peter's room and shut the door. Peter, unnerved, groped, and presently found and lighted a lamp. He put it down on his little table among his primary papers and examination papers. He indicated to Captain Renfrew the single chair in the room.

But the old gentleman stood motionless in the mean room, with its head- line streaked walls. Sounds of the heavy lifting of Peter's mother came through the thin door and partition with painful clearness. Peter opened his own small window, for the air in his room was foul.

Captain Renfrew stood in silence, with a remote sarcasm in his wrinkled eyes. What was in his heart, why he had subjected himself to the noisomeness of failing flesh, Peter had not the faintest idea. Once, out of studently habit, he glanced at Peter's philosophic books, but apparently he read the titles without really observing them. Once he looked at Peter.

"Peter," he said colorlessly, "I hope you'll be careful of Caroline's feelings if she ever gets up again. She has been very faithful to you, Peter."

Peter's eyes dampened. A great desire mounted in him to explain himself to this strange old gentleman, to show him how inevitable had been the breach. For some reason a veritable passion to reveal his heart to this his sole benefactor surged through the youth.

"Mr. Renfrew," he stammered, "Mr. Renfrew—I—I—" His throat abruptly ached and choked. He felt his face distort in a spasm of uncontrollable grief. He turned quickly from this strange old man with a remote sarcasm in his eyes and a remote affection in his tones. Peter clenched his jaws, his nostrils spread in his effort stoically to bottle up his grief and remorse, like a white man; in an effort to keep from howling his agony aloud, like a negro. He stood with aching throat and blurred eyes, trembling, swallowing, and silent.

Presently Nan Berry opened the door. She held a half-burned paper in her hand; Dr. Jallup stood near the bed, portioning out some calomel and quinine. The prevalent disease in Hooker's Bend is malaria; Dr. Jallup always physicked for malaria. On this occasion he diagnosed it must be a very severe attack of malaria indeed, so he measured out enormous doses.

He took a glass of the water that Viny had brought, held up old Caroline's head, and washed down two big capsules into the already poisoned stomach of the old negress. His simple face was quite inscrutable as he did this. He left other capsules for Nan to administer at regular intervals. Then he and Captain Renfrew motored out of Niggertown, out of its dust and filth and stench.

At four o'clock in the morning Caroline Siner died.



CHAPTER VI

When Nan Berry saw that Caroline was dead, the black woman dropped a glass of water and a capsule of calomel and stared. A queer terror seized her. She began such a wailing that it aroused others in Niggertown. At the sound they got out of their beds and came to the Siner cabin, their eyes big with mystery and fear. At the sight of old Caroline's motionless body they lifted their voices through the night.

The lamentation carried far beyond the confines of Niggertown. The last gamblers in the cedar glade heard it, and it broke up their gaming and drinking. White persons living near the black crescent were waked out of their sleep and listened to the eerie sound. It rose and fell in the darkness like a melancholy organ chord. The wailing of the women quivered against the heavy grief of the men. The half-asleep listeners were moved by its weirdness to vague and sinister fancies. The dolor veered away from what the Anglo-Saxon knows as grief and was shot through with the uncanny and the terrible. White children crawled out of their small beds and groped their way to their parents. The women shivered and asked of the darkness, "What makes the negroes howl so?"

Nobody knew,—least of all, the negroes. Nobody suspected that the bedlam harked back to the jungle, to black folk in African kraals beating tom-toms and howling, not in grief, but in an ecstasy of terror lest the souls of their dead might come back in the form of tigers or pythons or devils and work woe to the tribe. Through the night the negroes wailed on, performing through custom an ancient rite of which they knew nothing. They supposed themselves heartbroken over the death of Caroline Siner.

Amid this din Peter Siner sat in his room, stunned by the sudden taking off of his mother. The reproaches that she had expressed to old Captain Renfrew clung in Peter's brain. The brown man had never before realized the faint amusement and condescension that had flavored all his relations with his mother since his return home. But he knew now that she had felt his disapproval of her lifelong habits; that she saw he never explained or attempted to explain his thoughts to her, assuming her to be too ignorant; as she put it, "a fool."

The pathos of his mother's last days, what she had expected, what she had received, came to Peter with the bitterness of what is finished and irrevocable. She had been dead only a few minutes, yet she could never know his grief and remorse; she could never forgive him. She was utterly removed in a few minutes, in a moment in the failing of a breath. The finality of death overpowered him.

Into his room, through the thin wall, came the catch of numberless sobs, the long-drawn open wails, and the spasms of sobbing. Blurred voices called, "O Gawd! Gawd hab mercy! Hab mercy!" Now words were lost in the midst of confusion. The clamor boomed through the thin partition as if it would shake down his newspapered walls. With wet cheeks and an aching throat, Peter sat by his table, staring at his book-case in silence, like a white man.

The dim light of his lamp fell over his psychologies and philosophies. These were the books that had given him precedence over the old washwoman who kept him in college. It was reading these books that had made him so wise that the old negress could not even follow his thoughts. Now in the hour of his mother's death the backs of his metaphysics blinked at him emptily. What signified their endless pages about dualism and monism, about phenomenon and noumenon? His mother was dead. And she had died embittered against him because he had read and had been bewildered by these empty, wordy volumes.

A sense of profound defeat, of being ultimately fooled and cozened by the subtleties of white men, filled Peter Siner. He had eaten at their table, but their meat was not his meat. The uproar continued. Standing out of the din arose the burden of negro voices "Hab mercy! Gawd hab mercy!"

In the morning the Ladies of Tabor came and washed and dressed Caroline Siner's body and made it ready for burial. For twenty years the old negress had paid ten cents a month to her society to insure her burial, and now the lodge made ready to fulfil its pledge. After many comings and goings, the black women called Peter to see their work, as if for his approval.

The huge dead woman lay on the four-poster with a sheet spread over the lower part of her body. The ministrants had clothed it in the old black- silk dress, with its spreading seams and panels of different materials. It reminded Peter of the new dress he had meant to get his mother, and of the modish suit which at that moment molded his own shoulders and waist. The pitifulness of her sacrifices trembled in Peter's throat. He pressed his lips together, and nodded silently to the black Ladies of Tabor.

Presently the white undertaker, a silent little man with a brisk yet sympathetic air, came and made some measurements. He talked to Peter in undertones about the finishing of the casket, how much the Knights of Tabor would pay, what Peter wanted. Then he spoke of the hour of burial, and mentioned a somewhat early hour because some of the negroes wanted to ship as roustabouts on the up-river packet, which was due at any moment.

These decisions, asked of Peter, kept pricking him and breaking through the stupefaction of this sudden tragedy. He kept nodding a mechanical agreement until the undertaker had arranged all the details. Then the little man moved softly out of the cabin and went stepping away through the dust of Niggertown with professional briskness. A little later two black grave-diggers set out with picks and shovels for the negro graveyard.

Numberless preparations for the funeral were going on all over Niggertown. The Knights of Tabor were putting on their regalia. Negro women were sending out hurry notices to white mistresses that they would be unable to cook the noonday meal. Dozens of negro girls flocked to the hair-dressing establishment of Miss Mallylou Speers. All were bent on having their wool straightened for the obsequies, and as only a few of them could be accommodated, the little room was packed. A smell of burning hair pervaded it. The girls sat around waiting their turn. Most of them already had their hair down,—or, rather loose, for it stood out in thick mats. The hair-dresser had a small oil stove on which lay heating half a dozen iron combs. With a hot comb she teased each strand of wool into perfect straightness and then plastered it down with a greasy pomade. The result was a stiff effect, something like the hair of the Japanese. It required about three hours to straighten the hair of one negress. The price was a dollar and a half.

By half-past nine o'clock a crowd of negro men, in lodge aprons and with spears, and negro women, with sashes of ribbon over their shoulders and across the breasts, assembled about the Siner cabin. In the dusty curving street were ranged half a dozen battered vehicles,—a hearse, a delivery wagon, some rickety buggies, and a hack. Presently the undertaker arrived with a dilapidated black hearse which he used especially for negroes. He jumped down, got out his straps and coffin stands, directed some negro men to bring in the coffin, then hurried into the cabin with his air of brisk precision.

He placed the coffin on the stands near the bed; then a number of men slipped the huge black body into it. The undertaker settled old Caroline's head against the cotton pillows, running his hand down beside her cheek and tipping her face just so. Then he put on the cover, which left a little oval opening just above her dead face. The sight of old Caroline's face seen through the little oval pane moved some of the women to renewed sobs. Eight black men took up the coffin and carried it out with the slow, wide-legged steps of roustabouts. Parson Ranson, in a rusty Prince Albert coat, took Peter's arm and led him to the first vehicle after the hearse. It was a delivery wagon, but it was the best vehicle in the procession.

As Peter followed the coffin out, he saw the Knights and Ladies of Tabor lined up in marching order behind the van. The men held their spears and swords at attention; the women carried flowers. Behind the marchers came other old vehicles, a sorry procession.

At fifteen minutes to ten the bell in the steeple of the colored church tolled a single stroke. The sound quivered through the sunshine over Niggertown. At its signal the poor procession moved away through the dust. At intervals the bell tolled after the vanishing train.

As the negroes passed through the white town the merchants, lolling in their doors, asked passers-by what negro had died. The idlers under the mulberry in front of the livery-stable nodded at the old negro preacher in his long greenish-black coat, and Dawson Bobbs remarked:

"Well, old Parson Ranson's going to tell 'em about it to-day," and he shifted his toothpick with a certain effect of humor.

Old Mr. Tomwit asked if his companions had ever heard how Newt Bodler, a wit famous in Wayne County, once broke up a negro funeral with a hornets' nest. The idlers nodded a smiling affirmative as they watched the cortege go past. They had all heard it. But Mr. Tomwit would not be denied. He sallied forth into humorous reminiscence. Another loafer contributed an anecdote of how he had tied ropes to a dead negro so as to make the corpse sit up in bed and frighten the mourners.

All their tales were of the vintage of the years immediately succeeding the Civil War,—pioneer humor, such as convulsed the readers of Peck's Bad Boy, Mr. Bowser, Sut Lovingood. The favorite dramatic properties of such writers were the hornets' nest, the falling ladder, the banana peel. They cultivated the humor of contusions, the wit of impact. This style still holds the stage of Hooker's Bend.

In telling these tales the white villagers meant no special disrespect to the negro funeral. It simply reminded them of humorous things; so they told their jokes, like the naive children of the soil that they were.

At last the poor procession passed beyond the white church, around a bend in the road, and so vanished. Presently the bell in Niggertown ceased tolling.

* * * * *

Peter always remembered his mother's funeral in fragments of intolerable pathos,—the lifting of old Parson Ranson's hands toward heaven, the songs of the black folk, the murmur of the first shovelful of dirt as it was lowered to the coffin, and the final raw mound of earth littered with a few dying flowers. With that his mother—who had been so near to, and so disappointed in, her son—was blotted from his life. The other events of the funeral flowed by in a sort of dream: he moved about; the negroes were speaking to him in the queer overtones one uses to the bereaved; he was being driven back to Niggertown; he reentered the Siner cabin. One or two of his friends stayed in the room with him for a while and said vague things, but there was nothing to say.

Later in the afternoon Cissie Dildine and her mother brought his dinner to him. Vannie Dildine, a thin yellow woman, uttered a few disjointed words about Sister Ca'line being a good woman, and stopped amid sentence. There was nothing to say. Death had cut a wound across Peter Siner's life. Not for days, nor weeks, nor months, would his existence knit solidly back together. The poison of his ingratitude to his faithful old black mother would for a long, long day prevent the healing.



CHAPTER VII

During a period following his mother's death Peter Siner's life drifted emptily and without purpose. He had the feeling of one convalescing in a hospital. His days passed unconnected by any thread of purpose; they were like cards scattered on a table, meaning nothing.

At times he struggled against his lethargy. When he awoke in the morning and found the sun shining on his dusty primers and examination papers, he would think that he ought to go back to his old task; but he never did. In his heart grew a conviction that he would never teach school at Hooker's Bend.

He would rise and dress slowly in the still cabin, thinking he must soon make new plans and take up some work. He never decided precisely what work; his thoughts trailed on in vague, idle designs.

In fact, during Peter's reaction to his shock there began to assert itself in him that capacity for profound indolence inherent in his negro blood. To a white man time is a cumulative excitant. Continuous and absolute idleness is impossible; he must work, hunt, fish, play, gamble, or dissipate,—do something to burn up the accumulating sugar in his muscles. But to a negro idleness is an increasing balm; it is a stretching of his legs in the sunshine, a cat-like purring of his nerves; while his thoughts spread here and there in inconsequences, like water without a channel, making little humorous eddies, winding this way and that into oddities and fantasies without ever feeling that constraint of sequence which continually operates in a white brain. And it is this quality that makes negroes the entertainers of children par excellence.

Peter Siner's mental slackening made him understandable, and gave him a certain popularity in Nigger-town. Black men fell into the habit of dropping in at the Siner cabin, where they would sit outdoors, with chairs propped against the wall, and philosophize on the desultory life of the crescent. Sometimes they would relate their adventures on the river packets and around the docks at Paducah, Cairo, St. Joe, and St. Louis; usually a recountal of drunkenness, gaming, fighting, venery, arrests, jail sentences, petty peculations, and escapes. Through these Iliads of vagabondage ran an irresponsible gaiety, a non-morality, and a kind of unbrave zest for adventure. They told of their defeats and flights with as much relish and humor as of their charges and victories. And while the spirit was thoroughly pagan, these accounts were full of the cliches of religion. A roustabout whom every one called the Persimmon confided to Peter that he meant to cut loose some logs in a raft up the river, float 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 again.

"Too many divo'ces in dis country now, Persimmon," he moralized.

"Well, whut's de cause uv 'em?" asked the Persimmon, suddenly bringing his protruding yellow eyes around on the sleight-of-hand performer.

Jim Pink was slightly taken aback; then he said:

"'Spicion; nothin' but 'spicion."

"Yeah, 'spicion," growled the Persimmon; "'spicion an' de husban' leadin' a irreg'lar life."

Jim Pink looked at his companion, curiously.

"The husban'—leadin' a irreg'lar life?"

"Yeah,"—the Persimmon nodded grimly,—"the husban' comin' home at onexpected hours. You know whut I means, Jim Pink."

Jim Pink let his pebble fall and lowered the fore legs of his chair softly to the ground.

"Now, look heah, Persimmon, you don' want to be draggin' no foreign disco'se into yo' talk heah befo' Mr. Siner an' Parson Ranson."

The Persimmon rose deliberately.

"All I want to say is, I drapped off'n de matrimonial tree three times a'ready, Jim Pink, an' I think I feels somebody shakin' de limb ag'in."

The old negro preacher rose, too, a little behind Jim Pink.

"Now, boys! boys!" he placated. "You jes think dat, Persimmon."

"Yeah," admitted Persimmon, "I jes think it; but ef I b'lieve ever'thing is so whut I think is so, I'd part Jim Pink's wool wid a brickbat."

Parson Ranson tried to make peace, but the Persimmon spread his hands in a gesture that included the three men. "Now, I ain't sayin' nothin'," he stated solemnly, "an' I ain't makin' no threats; but ef anything happens, you-all kain't say that nobody didn' tell nobody about nothin'."

With this the Persimmon walked to the gate, let himself out, still looking back at Jim Pink, and then started down the dusty street.

Mr. Staggs seemed uncomfortable under the Persimmon's protruding yellow stare, but finally, when the roustabout was gone, he shrugged, regained his aplomb, and remarked that some niggers spent their time in studyin' 'bout things they hadn't no info'mation on whatever. Then he strolled off up the crescent in the other direction.

All this would have made fair minstrel patter if Peter Siner had shared the white conviction that every emotion expressed in a negro's patois is humorous. Unfortunately, Peter was too close to the negroes to hold such a tenet. He knew this quarrel was none the less rancorous for having been couched in the queer circumlocution of black folk. And behind it all shone the background of racial promiscuity out of which it sprang. It was like looking at an open sore that touched all of Niggertown, men and boys, young girls and women. It caused tragedies, murders, fights, and desertions in the black village as regularly as the rotation of the calendar; yet there was no public sentiment against it. Peter wondered how this attitude of his whole people could possibly be.

With the query the memory of Ida May came back to him, with its sense of dim pathos. It seemed to Peter now as if their young and uninstructed hands had destroyed a safety-vault to filch a penny.

The reflex of a thought of Ida May always brought Peter to Cissie; it always stirred up in him a desire to make this young girl's path gentle and smooth. There was a fineness, a delicacy about Cissie, that, it seemed to Peter, Ida May had never possessed. Then, too, Cissie was moved by a passion for self-betterment. She deserved a cleaner field than the Niggertown of Hooker's Bend.

Peter took Parson Ranson's arm, and the two moved to the gate by common consent. It was no longer pleasant to sit here. The quarrel they had heard somehow had flavored their surroundings.

Peter turned his steps mechanically northward up the crescent toward the Dildine cabin. Nothing now restrained him from calling on Cissie; he would keep no dinner waiting; he would not be warned and berated on his return home. The nagging, jealous love of his mother had ended.

As the two men walked along, it was borne in upon Peter that his mother's death definitely ended one period of his life. There was no reason why he should continue his present unsettled existence. It seemed best to marry Cissie at once and go North. Further time in this place would not be good for the girl. Even if he could not lift all Niggertown, he could at least help Cissie. He had had no idea, when he first planned his work, what a tremendous task he was essaying. The white village had looked upon the negroes so long as non-moral and non- human that the negroes, with the flexibility of their race, had assimilated that point of view. The whites tried to regulate the negroes by endless laws. The negroes had come to accept this, and it seemed that they verily believed that anything not discovered by the constable was permissible. Mr. Dawson Bobbs was Niggertown's conscience. It was best for Peter to take from this atmosphere what was dearest to him, and go at once.

The brown man's thoughts came trailing back to the old negro parson hobbling at his side. He looked at the old man, hesitated a moment, then told him what was in his mind.

Parson Ranson's face wrinkled into a grin.

"You's gwine to git ma'ied?"

"And I thought I'd have you perform the ceremony."

This suggestion threw the old negro into excitement.

"Me, Mr. Peter?"

"Yes. Why not?"

"Why, Mr. Peter, I kain't jine you an' Miss Cissie Dildine."

Peter looked at him, astonished.

"Why can't you?"

"Whyn't you git a white preacher?"

"Well," deliberated Peter, gravely, "it's a matter of principle with me, Parson Ranson. I think we colored people ought to be more self-reliant, more self-serving. We ought to lead our own lives instead of being mere echoes of white thought." He made a swift gesture, moved by this passion of his life. "I don't mean racial equality. To my mind racial equality is an empty term. One might as well ask whether pink and violet are equal. But what I do insist on is autonomous development."

The old preacher nodded, staring into the dust. "Sho! 'tonomous 'velopment."

Peter saw that his language, if not his thought, was far beyond his old companion's grasp, and he lacked the patience to simplify himself.

"Why don't you want to marry us, Parson?"

Parson Ranson lifted his brows and filled his forehead with wrinkles.

"Well, I dunno. You an' Miss Cissie acts too much lak white folks fuh a nigger lak me to jine you, Mr. Peter."

Peter made a sincere effort to be irritated, but he was not.

"That's no way to feel. It's exactly what I was talking about,—racial self-reliance. You've married hundreds of colored couples."

"Ya-as, suh,"—the old fellow scratched his black jaw.—"I kin yoke up a pair uv ordina'y niggers all right. Sometimes dey sticks, sometimes dey don't." The old man shook his white, kinky head. "I'll bust in an' try to hitch up you-all. I—I dunno whedder de cer'mony will hol' away up North or not."

"It'll be all right anywhere, Parson," said Peter, seriously. "Your name on the marriage-certificate will—can you write?"

"N-no, suh."

After a brief hesitation Peter repeated determinedly:

"It'll be all right. And, by the way, of course, this will be a very quiet wedding."

"Yas-suh." The old man bobbed importantly.

"I wouldn't mention it to any one."

"No, suh; no, suh. I don' blame you a-tall, Mr. Peter, wid dat Tump Pack gallivantin' roun' wid a forty-fo'. Hit would keep 'mos' anybody's weddin' ve'y quiet onless he wuz lookin' fuh a short cut to heab'n."

As the two negroes passed the Berry cabin, Nan Berry thrust out her spiked head and called to Peter Captain Renfrew wanted to see him.

Peter paused, with quickened interest in this strange old man who had come to his mother's death-bed with a doctor. Peter asked Nan what the Captain wanted.

Nan did not know. Wince Washington had told Nan that the Captain wanted to see Peter. Bluegum Frakes had told Wince; Jerry Dillihay had told Bluegum; but any further meanderings of the message, when it started, or what its details might be, Nan could not state.

It was a typical message from a resident of the white town to a denizen of Niggertown. Such messages are delivered to any black man for any other black man, not only in the village, but anywhere in the outlying country. It may be passed on by a dozen or a score of mouths before it reaches its objective. It may be a day or a week in transit, but eventually it will be delivered verbatim. This queer system of communication is a relic of slavery, when the master would send out word for some special negro out of two or three hundred slaves to report at the big house.

However, as Peter approached the Dildine cabin, thoughts of his approaching marriage drove from his mind even old Captain Renfrew's message. His heart beat fast from having made his first formal step toward wedlock. The thought of having Cissie all to himself, swept his nerves in a gust.

He opened the gate, and ran up between the dusty lines of dwarf box, eager to tell her what he had done. He thumped on the cracked, unpainted door, and impatiently waited the skirmish of observation along the edge of the window-blinds. This was unduly drawn out. Presently he heard women's voices whispering to each other inside. They seemed urgent, almost angry voices. Now and then he caught a sentence:

"What difference will it make?" "I couldn't." "Why couldn't you?" "Because—" "That's because you've been to Nashville." "Oh, well—" A chair was moved over a bare floor. A little later footsteps came to the entrance, the door opened, and Cissie's withered yellow mother stood before him.

Vannie offered her hand and inquired after Peter's health with a stopped voice that instantly recalled his mother's death. After the necessary moment of talk, the mulatto inquired for Cissie.

The yellow woman seemed slightly ill at ease.

"Cissie ain't so well, Peter."

"She's not ill?"

"N-no; but the excitement an' ever'thing—" answered Vannie, vaguely.

In the flush of his plans, Peter was keenly disappointed.

"It's very important, Mrs. Dildine."

Vannie's dried yellow face framed the ghost of a smile.

"Ever'thing a young man's got to say to a gal is ve'y important, Peter."

It seemed to Peter a poor time for a jest; his face warmed faintly.

"It—it's about some of the details of our—our wedding."

"If you'll excuse her to-day, Peter, an' come after supper—"

Peter hesitated, and was about to go away when Cissie's voice came from an inner room, telling her mother to admit him.

The yellow woman glanced at the door on the left side of the hall, crossed over and opened it, stood to one side while Peter entered, and closed it after him, leaving the two alone.

The room into which Peter stepped was dark, after the fashion of negro houses. Only after a moment's survey did he see Cissie sitting near a big fireplace made of rough stone. The girl started to rise as Peter advanced toward her, but he solicitously forbade it and hurried over to her. When he leaned over her and put his arms about her, his ardor was slightly dampened when she gave him her cheek instead of her lips to kiss.

"Surely, you're not too ill to be kissed?" he rallied faintly.

"You kissed me. I thought we had agreed, Peter, you were not to come in the daytime any more."

"Oh, is that it?" Peter patted her shoulder, cheerfully. "Don't worry; I have just removed any reason why I shouldn't come any time I want to."

Cissie looked at him, her dark eyes large in the gloom.

"What have you done?"

"Got a preacher to marry us; on my way now for a license. Dropped in to ask if you 'll be ready by tomorrow or next day."

The girl gasped.

"But, Peter—"

Peter drew a chair beside her in a serious argumentative mood.

"Yes I think we ought to get married at once. No reason why we shouldn't get it over with—Why, what's the matter?"

"So soon after your mother's death, Peter?"

"It's to get away from Hooker's Bend, Cissie—to get you away. I don't like for you to stay here. It's all so—" he broke off, not caring to open the disagreeable subject.

The girl sat staring down at some fagots smoldering on the hearth. At that moment they broke into flame and illuminated her sad face.

"You'll go, won't you?" asked Peter at last, with a faint uncertainty.

The girl looked up.

"Oh—I—I'd be glad to, Peter,"—she gave a little shiver. "Ugh! this Niggertown is a—a terrible place!"

Peter leaned over, took one of her hands, and patted it.

"Then we'll go," he said soothingly. "It's decided—tomorrow. And we'll have a perfectly lovely wedding trip," he planned cheerfully, to draw her mind from her mood. "On the car going North I'll get a whole drawing-room. I've always wanted a drawing-room, and you'll be my excuse. We'll sit and watch the fields and woods and cities slip past us, and know, when we get off, we can walk on the streets as freely as anybody. We'll be a genuine man and wife."