Dawson bobbed his fat head backward and upward in a signal for Peter to approach. It held the casualness of one certain to be obeyed.
Although Peter had done no crime, nor had even harbored a criminal intention, a trickle of apprehension went through him at Bobbs's nod. He recalled Jim Pink's saying that it was bad luck to see the constable. He walked up to the shuddering motor and stood about three feet from the running-board.
The officer bit on a sliver of toothpick that he held in his thin lips.
"Accident up Jonesboro las' night, Peter."
"What was it, Mr. Bobbs?"
"Tump Pack got killed."
Peter continued looking fixedly at Mr. Bobbs's broad red face. The dusty road beneath him seemed to give a little dip. He repeated the information emptily, trying to orient himself to this sudden change in his whole mental horizon.
The officer was looking at Peter fixedly with his chill slits of eyes.
"Yeah; trying to make a jail delivery."
The two men continued looking at each other, one from the road, the other from the motor. The flow of Peter's thoughts seemed to divide. The greater part was occupied with Tump Pack. Peter could vision the formidable ex-soldier lying dead in Jonesboro jail, with his little congressional medal on his breast. Some lighter portion of his mind nickered about here and there on trivial things. He observed a little hole rusted in the running-board of the motor. He noticed that the officer's eyes were just the same chill, washed blue as the winter sky above his head. He remembered a tale that, before electrocution became a law in Tennessee the county sheriff's nerve had failed him at a hanging, and the constable Dawson Bobbs had sprung the drop. There was something terrible about the fat man. He would do anything, absolutely anything, that came to his hands in the way of legal sewage.