A certain vague sense of triumph trickled through some obscure corner of Peter's mind. It was so subtle that Peter himself would have been the first, in all good faith, to deny it and to affirm that all his motives were altruistic. Once he looked back through the cedars. He could still see the boy hunched over, chin in fist, staring at the mat of needles.
As Peter turned the brow of the Big Hill, he saw at its eastern foot the village church, a plain brick building with a decaying spire. Its side was perforated by four tall arched windows. Each was a memorial window of stained glass, which gave the building a black look from the outside. As Peter walked down the hill toward the church he heard the and somewhat nasal singing of uncultivated voices mingled with the snoring of a reed organ.
When he reached Main Street, Peter found the whole business portion virtually deserted. All the stores were closed, and in every show-window stood a printed notice that no business would be transacted between the hours of two and three o'clock in the afternoon during the two weeks of revival then in progress. Beside this notice stood another card, giving the minister's text for the current day. On this particular day it read:
GO YE INTO ALL THE WORLD
Come hear Rev. E.B. Blackwater's great
Missionary Address on
CHRISTIANIZING AFRICA
ELOQUENT, PROFOUND, HEART-SEARCHING.
ILLUSTRATED WITH SLIDES.
Half a dozen negroes lounged in the sunshine on Hobbett's corner as Peter came up. They were amusing themselves after the fashion of blacks, with mock fights, feints, sudden wrestlings. They would seize one another by the head and grind their knuckles into one another's wool. Occasionally, one would leap up and fall into one of those grotesque shuffles called "breakdowns." It all held a certain rawness, an irrepressible juvenility.
As Peter came up, Tump Pack detached himself from the group and gave a pantomime of thrusting. He was clearly reproducing the action which had won for him his military medal. Then suddenly he fell down in the dust and writhed. He was mimicking with a ghastly realism the death-throes of his four victims. His audience howled with mirth at this dumb show of the bayonet-fight and of killing four men. Tump himself got up out of the dust with tears of laughter in his eyes. Peter caught the end of his sentence, "Sho put it to 'em, black boy. Fo' white men—"
His audience roared again, swayed around, and pounded one another in an excess of mirth.