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Updated: June 7, 2025
"You kin ca'y 'em ef you don' keep 'em hid," explained the ex-soldier in a wooden voice. "Mr. Bobbs tol' me dat when he guv my gun back." The irony of the thing caught Peter, for the authorities to arrest Tump not because he was trying to kill Peter, but because he went about his first attempt in an illegal manner.
He said Blackwater could touch the hardest heart, and, sure enough, Mr. Hooker's rather popped and narrow-set eyes looked as though he had been crying. All this encomium was given in a high, cracked voice as the cashier opened the door and turned the negroes into the bank. Tump, who stood with his hat off, listening to all the cashier had to say, said he thought so, too.
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.
Through the veils of flying dust he made out some one, and a moment later identified not Tump Pack, but the gangling form of Jim Pink Staggs, clad in a dark-blue sack-coat and white flannel trousers with pin stripes. It was the sort of costume affected by interlocutors of minstrel shows; it had a minstrel trigness about it. As a matter of fact, Jim Pink was a sort of semi-professional minstrel.
I remember once paying a visit to the Tump Pit at or near Rowley Regis at a time when the men were taking their midday meal. There was a sort of Hall of Eblis there, a roof thirty feet high or thereabouts, and the men sat in a darkness dimly revealed by the light of one or two tallow candles.
Then later, and much nearer, a couple of shots were fired. He learned afterward that those shots were meant for one of his friends. At length there was a faint tump ta tump ta. He drew his knife, stuck it deep in the ground, then held the handle in his teeth.
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."
He shook his dusty head. "You ain't never been in jail, is you, black man?" Peter said he had not. "Lawd! it ain't no place fuh a woman," declared Tump. "You dunno nothin' 'bout it, black man. It sho ain't no place fuh a woman." A notion of an iron cage floated before Peter's mind.
On a table in the middle of the lawn glittered some pieces of silver plate which formed the first, second, and third prizes for the three leading scores. The constable halted his black company before the lawn, where they stood in the sunshine patiently waiting for the justice of the peace to finish his game and hear the case of the State of Tennessee, plaintiff, versus Tump Pack, defendant.
It was war then; you were fighting for your country." At Jackson, Tennessee, the two negroes were forced to spend the night between trains. Tump Pack piloted Peter Siner to a negro cafe where they could eat, and later they searched out a negro lodging-house on Gate Street where they could sleep.
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