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He shoved it back under the grill. "And lemme give you a little friendly advice. I'd just run an ordinary nigger school if I was you. This higher education don't seem to make a nigger much smarter when he comes back than when he starts out." A faint smile bracketed the thin nose. Dawson Bobbs roared with sudden appreciation, took the bill from Peter's fingers, and pushed it back under the grill.
The cashier picked up the money, casually. He considered a moment, then reached for a long envelop. As he did so, the incident with Peter evidently passed from his mind, for his hatchet face lighted up as with some inward illumination. "Bobbs," he said warmly, "that was a great sermon Brother Blackwater preached. It made me want to help according as the Lord has blessed me.
Presently Tump Pack's form outlined itself in the yellow obscurity, groping toward Peter. He still held his pistol, but it swung at his side. He called Peter's name in the strained voice of a man struggling not to cough: "Peter is Mr. Bobbs done 'rested Cissie?" Peter could hardly talk himself. "Don't know. Looks like it." The two negroes stared at each other through the dust. "Fuh Gawd's sake!
Presently Bobbs continued, gravely enough: "Talking about Siner, he's stayin' up at old man Renfrew's now." "'At so?" "Old Rose Hobbett swears he's doin' some sort of writin' up there and livin' in one of the old man's best rooms." "Hell he is!" "Yeah?" the constable's voice questioned Throgmartin's opinion about such heresy and expressed his own. "D' recken it's so?
"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.
Mrs Neverbend swore a solemn oath that Jack should be made to abandon his cricket; but Jack was playing again the next day, with his face strapped up athwart and across with republican black-silk adhesive. When I saw Bobbs at work over him I thought that one side of his face was gone, and that his eye would be dreadfully out of place. "All his chance of marrying Eva is gone," said I to my wife.
Up to this point white criticism viewed the stage-setting of the black comedy with the impersonal interest of a box party. Some of the round table said they believed there would be a dead coon or so before the scrape was over. Dawson Bobbs, the ponderous constable, went to the trouble to telephone Mr.
Bobbs sat listening impassively, moving his toothpick up and down from one side to the other of his small, thin-lipped mouth. At last he nodded. "Well, I guess that's about the way of it. I didn't exactly understand the women's clothes business, damn' fool disguise, but we figgered it might pop into the head of a' edjucated nigger." He sucked his teeth, reflectively.
Presently Bobbs came angling across the street toward the Siner cabin. As he entered the rickety gate, old Caroline called out: "Whut is you after, anyway, white man?" Bobbs turned cold, truculent eyes on the old negress. "A turkey roaster," he snapped. "Some o' you niggers stole Miss Lou Arkwright's turkey roaster." "Tukky roaster!" cried the old black woman, in great disgust.
"Sick o' yo' deal, Peter?" inquired Bobbs, smiling and shifting the toothpick. He bit down on it. "Well, whut-chu want done, Henry?" "Oh," hesitated the cashier in a quandary, "nothing, I suppose. Siner was excited; you know how niggers are. We can't afford to send every nigger to the pen that breaks the law." He stood studying Peter out of his close-set eyes. "Here's your deed, Peter."
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