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At this point in his thoughts there gradually limned itself in the brown man's mind the answer to that enigma which he almost had unraveled on the day he first saw Cissie Dildine pass his window. With it came the answer to the puzzle contained in the old Captain's library.
"With Cissie? Cissie Dildine?" "Uh huh." "Why, what makes you think I'm going to do anything with Cissie?" "M-m, visitin' roun'." The fool flung his face into a grimace, and dropped it as one might shake out a sack. Peter watched the contortion uneasily. "What do you mean visiting around?" "Diff'nt folks go visitin' roun'; Some goes up an' some goes down."
He took his work to the window and tried to concentrate upon it, but his mind kept playing away. Indeed, it seemed to Peter that to sit in this old room and rewrite the wordy meanderings of the old gentleman's book was the very height of emptiness. How utterly futile, when all around him, on every hand, girls like Cissie Dildine were being indentured to corruption!
The "worthinesses" and "disgraces" implicit in Harvard atmosphere, which Peter had spent four years of his life imbibing, slowly melted away in the air of Niggertown. What was honorable there, what was disgraceful there, somehow changed its color here. By virtue of this change Peter felt intuitively that Cissie Dildine was neither disgraced by her arrest nor soiled by her physical condition.
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.
"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!"
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.
Peter watched him go, then turned and attempted to throw the whole matter off his mind by assuming 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.
At first he put it down to mere niggerish taste, and his dislike for the girl edged his stricture; then, on second thought, the oddness of sumac for a nosegay caught his attention. Nobody used sumac for a buttonhole. He had never heard of any woman, white or black, using sumac for a bouquet. Why should this Cissie Dildine trig herself out in sumac?
He even thought of abandoning his little design of going for the books; or he would go at a different hour, or to-morrow, or not at all. He told himself he would far better allow Cissie Dildine to pass and repass unspoken to, instead of trying to arrange an accidental meeting. But the brown man's nerves wouldn't hear to it.
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