The depression of the whole day settled upon Peter with the deepening night. He held his poor light above his head and picked his way to his own room. After the magnificence of the Renfrew manor, it had contracted to a grimy little box lined with yellowed papers. His books were still intact, but Henry Hooker would get them as part payment on the Dillihay place, which Henry owned. On his little table still lay the pile of old examination papers, lists of incoherent questions which somebody somewhere imagined formed a test of human ability to meet and answer the mysterious searchings of life.

Peter was familiar with the books; many of the questions he had learned by rote, but the night and the crescent, and the thought of a pregnant girl caged in the blackness of a jail filled his soul with a great melancholy query to which he could find no answer.

CHAPTER XIX

Two voices talking, interrupting each other with e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, after the fashion of negroes under excitement, aroused Peter Siner from his sleep.

He caught the words: "He did! Tump did! The jailer did! 'Fo' G.o.d! black man, whut's Cissie doin'?"

Overtones of shock, even of horror, in the two voices brought Peter wide awake the moment he opened his eyes. He sat up suddenly in his bed, remained perfectly still, listening with his mouth open. The voices, however, were pa.s.sing. The words became indistinct, then relapsed into that bubbling monotone of human voices at a distance, and presently ceased.

These fragmentary phrases, however, feathered with consternation, filled Peter with vague premonitions. He whirled his legs out of bed and began drawing on his clothes. When he was up and into the crescent, however, n.o.body was in sight. He stood breathing the chill, damp air, blinking his eyes. Lack of his cold bath made him feel chilly and lethargic. He wriggled his shoulders and considered going back, after all, and having his splash. Just then he saw the Persimmon coming around the crescent.

Peter called to the roustabout and asked about Tump Pack.

The Persimmon looked at Peter with his half-asleep, protruding eyeb.a.l.l.s.

"Don' you know 'bout Tump Pack already, Mister Siner?"

"No." Peter was astonished at the formality of the "Mr. Siner."

"Then is you 'spectin' somp'n 'bout him?"

"Why, no, but I was asleep in there a moment ago, and somebody came along talking about Tump and Cissie. They--they aren't married, are they?"

"Oh, no-o, no-o-o, no-o-o-o-o." The Persimmon waggled his bullet head slowly from side to side. "I heared Tump got into a lil trouble wid de jailer las' night."

"Serious?"

"I dunno." The Persimmon closed one of his protruding yellow eyes.

"Owin' to whut you call se'ius; maybe whut I call se'ius wouldn't be se'ius to you at all; 'n 'en maybe whut you call se'ius would be ve'y insince'ius to Tump." The roustabout's philosophy, which consisted in a monotonous recasting of a given proposition, trickled on and on in the cold wind. After a while it fizzled out to nothing at all, and the Persimmon asked in a queer manner: "Did you give Tump some women's clo'es, Peter?"

It was such an odd question that at first Peter was at loss; then he recalled Nan Berry's despatching Cissie some underwear. He explained this to the Persimmon, and tacked on a curious, "Why?"

"Oh, nothin'; nothin' 'tall. Ever'body say you a mighty long-haided n.i.g.g.e.r. Jim Pink he tell us 'bout Tump Pack marchin' you 'roun' wid a gun. I sho don' want you ever git mad at me, Mister Siner. Man wid a gun an' you turn yo' long haid on him an' blow him away wid a wad o' women's clo'es. I sho don' want you ever cross yo' fingers at me, Mister Siner."

Peter stared at the grotesque, bullet-headed roustabout. "Persimmon," he said uneasily, "what in the world are you talking about?"

The Persimmon smiled a sickly, white-toothed smile. "Jim Pink say yo'

aidjucation is a flivver. I say, 'Jim Pink, no n.i.g.g.e.r don' go off an'

study fo' yeahs in college whut 'n he comes back an' kin throw some kin'

uv a hoodoo over us fool n.i.g.g.e.rs whut ain't got no brains. Now, Tump wid a gun, an' you wid jes ordina'y women's clo'es! 'Fo' Gawd, aidjucation is a great thing; sho is a great thing." The Persimmon gave Peter an apprehensive wink and moved on.

There was no use trying to extract information from the Persimmon unless he was minded to give it. His talk would merely become vaguer and vaguer. Peter watched him go, then turned and attempted to throw the whole matter off his mind by a.s.suming a certain brisk Northern mood. He must pack, get ready for the down-river gasolene launch. The doings of Tump Pack and Cissie Dildine were, after all, nothing to him.

He started inside, when the levy notice on the door again met his eyes.

He paused, read it over once more, and decided that he must go over the hill to the Planter's Bank and get Henry Hooker's permission to remove certain small personal belongings that he wanted to take with him.

The mere clear-cut decision to go invigorated Peter.

Some of the energy that always filled him during his college days in Boston seemed to come to him now from the mere thought of the North.

Soon he would be in the midst of it, moving briskly, talking to wide- awake men to whom a slightly unusual English word would not form a stumbling-block to conversation. He set out down the crescent and across the Big Hill at a swinging stride. He was glad to get away.

Beyond the white church on the other side of the hill he heard a motor coming in on the Jonesboro road. Presently he saw a battered car moving around the long swing of the pike, spewing a trail of dust down the wind. Its clacking became prodigious.

The mulatto was just entering that indefinite stretch of thoroughfare where a country road becomes a village street when there came a wail of brakes behind him and he looked around.

It was Dawson Bobbs's car. The fat man now slowed up not far from the mulatto and called to him.

"Yes, sir," said Peter.

Dawson bobbed his fat head backward and upward in a signal for Peter to approach. It held the casualness of one certain to be obeyed.

Although Peter had done no crime, nor had even harbored a criminal intention, a trickle of apprehension went through him at Bobbs's nod. He recalled Jim Pink's saying that it was bad luck to see the constable. He walked up to the shuddering motor and stood about three feet from the running-board.

The officer bit on a sliver of toothpick that he held in his thin lips.

"Accident up Jonesboro las' night, Peter."

"What was it, Mr. Bobbs?"

"Tump Pack got killed."

Peter continued looking fixedly at Mr. Bobbs's broad red face. The dusty road beneath him seemed to give a little dip. He repeated the information emptily, trying to orient himself to this sudden change in his whole mental horizon.

The officer was looking at Peter fixedly with his chill slits of eyes.

"Yeah; trying to make a jail delivery."

The two men continued looking at each other, one from the road, the other from the motor. The flow of Peter's thoughts seemed to divide. The greater part was occupied with Tump Pack. Peter could vision the formidable ex-soldier lying dead in Jonesboro jail, with his little congressional medal on his breast. Some lighter portion of his mind nickered about here and there on trivial things. He observed a little hole rusted in the running-board of the motor. He noticed that the officer's eyes were just the same chill, washed blue as the winter sky above his head. He remembered a tale that, before electrocution became a law in Tennessee the county sheriff's nerve had failed him at a hanging, and the constable Dawson Bobbs had sprung the drop. There was something terrible about the fat man. He would do anything, absolutely anything, that came to his hands in the way of legal sewage.

In the midst of these thoughts Peter heard himself saying.

"He--was trying to get Cissie out?"

"Yep."

"He--must have been drunk."

"Oh, yeah."

Mr. Bobbs sat studying the mulatto. As he studied him he said slowly:

"Some of 'em say he was disguised as a woman. Others say he had some women's clothes along, ready to put on. Now, me and the sheriff knowed Tump Pack purty well, Peter, and we knowed that n.i.g.g.e.r never in the worl' would 'a' thought up sich a plan by hisself."

He sat looking at Peter so interrogatively that the mulatto began, in a strained, earnest voice, telling the constable precisely what had happened in regard to the clothes.