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Tump's intellectual method was to talk sense just long enough to gain his companion's ear, and then produce something absurd and quash the tentative interest. Siner turned away from him and said, "Piffle." Tump was defensive at once. "'T ain't piffle, either! I's talkin' sense, nigger."

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, 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.

Peter Siner was too loyal to his new friendship with Cissie Dildine to allow his mother's jealous suspicions to affect him; nevertheless the old woman's observations about the turkey roaster did prevent a complete and care-free enjoyment of the meal. Certainly there were other turkey roasters in Hooker's Bend than Mrs. Arkwright's. Cissie might very well own a roaster.

He was plainly going through some mental card-index, hunting for the name of Peter Siner on some long-forgotten warrant. Apparently, he discovered nothing, for he said shortly: "How do I know before he's tried? Come on, Tump!" The procession moved in a long noisy line up Pillow Street, the white residential street lying to the west.

The negro looked at the hobbledehoy for several seconds before he recognized in the lanky youth a little Arkwright boy whom he had known and played with in his pre-college days. Now there was such an exaggerated wistfulness in young Arkwright's attitude that Peter was amused. "Hello, Sam," he called. "What you doing out here?" The Arkwright boy turned with a start. "Aw, is that you, Siner?"

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.

Could not Siner establish his school on the Dillihay place regardless of the clause, since the cashier would be estopped from obtaining an injunction by his own instrument? As a matter of fact, the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence sent a committee to wait on Mr. Hooker to see what action he meant to take on the notes that paid for his spurious deed. This brought another harvest of rumors.

There was where he had sat the evening Cissie made her painful confession to him. Only now did he realize the whole of what Cissie was trying to confess. Peter Siner overtook Tump Pack a little way down the crescent, opposite the Berry cabin. The thoroughfare was deserted, because the weather was cold and the scantily clad children were indoors.

Tump cut into his diatribe: "No use talkin' lak dat. Our 'ciety thought you wuz a aidjucated nigger. We didn't think no white man could put nothin' over on you." "Education!" snapped Siner. "Education isn't supposed to keep you away from shysters!" "Keep you away fum 'em!" cried Tump, in a scandalized voice.