"Let's go—to the Dildine house," he said.
The two moved hurriedly through the thinning cloud, and presently came to breathable air, where they could see the houses around them.
"I know she done somp'n; I know she done somp'n," chanted Tump, with the melancholy cadence of his race. 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. The two negroes trudged on through the crescent side by side, their steps raising a little trail of dust in the air behind them. Their faces and clothes were of a uniform dust color. Streaks of mud marked the runnels of their tears down their cheeks.
The shrubbery and weeds that grew alongside the negro thoroughfare were quite dead. Even the little avenue of dwarf box was withered that led from the gate to the door of the Dildine home. The two colored men walked up the little path to the door, knocked, and waited on the steps for the little skirmish of observation from behind the blinds. None came. The worst had befallen the house; there was nothing to guard. The door opened as soon as an inmate could reach it, and Vannie Dildine stood before them.
The quadroon's eyes were red, and her face had the moist, slightly swollen appearance that comes of protracted weeping. She looked so frail and miserable that Peter instinctively stepped inside and took her arm to assist her in the mere physical effort of standing.
"What is the matter, Mrs. Dildine?" he asked in a shocked tone. "What's happened to Cissie?"
Vannie began weeping again with a faint gasping and a racking of her flat chest.