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Updated: May 18, 2025
The moment his mind completed the little drama it started again from the very beginning. At Captain Renfrew's gate this mental mummery paused long enough for him to vacillate between walking in or going around and shouting from the back gate. It is a point of etiquette in Hooker's Bend that negroes shall enter a white house from the back stoop. Peter had no desire to transgress this custom.
"'Yes, said I, 'there's fine caviare at Billy Renfrew's cafe, corner of Thirty-fourth and "'God knows it, interrupts Mellinger, 'and if you'd told me you knew Billy Renfrew I'd have invented tons of ways of making you happy. Billy was my side-kicker in New York. There is a man who never knew what crooked was. Here I am working Honesty for a graft, but that man loses money on it. Carrambos!
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.
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.
These and similar volumes formed the scientific section of Captain Renfrew's library, and it was this paucity of the natural sciences that formed the problem which Peter tried to solve. All scientific additions came to an abrupt stop about the decade of 1880-90. That was the date when Charles Darwin's great fructifying theory, enunciated in 1859, began to seep into the South.
Benton squatted beside him, twisting a silk handkerchief with a stick tightly above the wound. His hands and Renfrew's clothing and the mossy ground was smeared with blood. Stella looked over his shoulder. The overalls were cut away. In the thick of the man's thigh stood a ragged gash she could have laid both hands in. She drew back. Benton looked up. "Better keep away," he advised shortly.
"'T war that man Renfrew's secret I hearn about his letter what war read down ter the mill." She nodded acquiescently, her expression once more abstracted, her thoughts far afield. He had one moment of triumph as he brought himself tensely erect, shouldering his gun his shadow behind him in the moonlight duplicated the gesture with a sharp promptness as at a word of command.
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?
"Den I knows which way you wants to go," piped the youngster in sudden helpfulness. "You wants to go over to Cap'n Renfrew's place acrost de Big Hill. He done sont fuh you. Mr. Wince Washington tol' me, ef I seed you, to tell you dat Cap'n Renfrew wants to see you. I dunno whut hit's about. I ast Wince, an' he didn' know." Peter recalled the message Nan Berry had given him some hours before.
The Captain's suspicions came to a point like a setter. He began sniffing about for Cissie's motives in choosing so queer an ornament. He wondered if it had anything to do with Peter Siner. All his life, Captain Renfrew's brain had been deliberate. He moved mentally, as he did physically, with dignity.
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