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. It was absurd to think that Cissie, in the midst of her almost pathetic struggle to break away from the uncouthness of Niggertown, would stoop to—Even in his thoughts Peter avoided nominating the charge.
And then, somehow, his memory fished up the fact that years ago Ida May, according to village rumor, was "light-fingered." At that time in Peter's life "light-fingeredness" carried with it no opprobrium whatever. It was simply a fact about Ida May, as were her sloe eyes and curling black hair. His reflections renewed his perpetual sense of queerness and strangeness that hall-marked every phase of Niggertown life since his return from the North.
Cissie Dildine's contribution tailed out the one hundred dollars that Peter needed, and after he had finished his meal, the mulatto set out across the Big Hill for the white section of the village, to complete his trade.
It was Peter's program to go to the Planter's Bank, pay down his hundred, and receive a deed from one Elias Tomwit, which the bank held in escrow. Two or three days before Peter had tried to borrow the initial hundred from the bank, but the cashier, Henry Hooker, after going into the transaction, had declined the loan, and therefore Siner had been forced to await a meeting of the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence. At this meeting the subscription had gone through promptly. The land the negroes purposed to purchase for an industrial school was a timbered tract tying southeast of Hooker's Bend on the head-waters of Ross Creek. A purchase price of eight hundred dollars had been agreed upon. The timber on the tract, sold on the stump, would bring almost that amount. It was Siner's plan to commandeer free labor in Niggertown, work off the timber, and have enough money to build the first unit of his school. A number of negro men already had subscribed a certain number of days' work in the timber. It was a modest and entirely practical program, and Peter felt set up over it.
The brown man turned briskly out into the hot afternoon sunshine, down the mean semicircular street, where piccaninnies were kicking up clouds of dust. He hurried through the dusty area, and presently turned off a by-path that led over the hill, through a glade of cedars, to the white village.
The glade was gloomy, but warm, for the shade of cedars somehow seems to hold heat. A carpet of needles hushed Siner's footfalls and spread a Sabbatical silence through the grove. The upward path was not smooth, but was broken with outcrops of the same reddish limestone that marks the whole stretch of the Tennessee River. Here and there in the grove were circles eight or ten feet in diameter, brushed perfectly clean of all needles and pebbles and twigs. These places were crap-shooters' circles, where black and white men squatted to shoot dice.
Under the big stones on the hillside, Peter knew, was cached illicit whisky, and at night the boot-leggers carried on a brisk trade among the gamblers. More than that, the glade on the Big Hill was used for still more demoralizing ends. It became a squalid grove of Ashtoreth; but now, in the autumn evening, all the petty obscenities of white and black sloughed away amid the religious implications of the dark-green aisles.
The sight of a white boy sitting on an outcrop of limestone with a strap of school-books dropped at his feet rather surprised Peter. 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?"