ed, so he measured out enormous doses.

He took a glass of the water that Viny had brought, held up old
Caroline's head, and washed down two big capsules into the already
poisoned stomach of the old negress. His simple face was quite
inscrutable as he did this. He left other capsules for Nan to administer
at regular intervals. Then he and Captain Renfrew motored out of
Niggertown, out of its dust and filth and stench.

At four o'clock in the morning Caroline Siner died.

CHAPTER VI

When Nan Berry saw that Caroline was dead, the black woman dropped a
glass of water and a capsule of calomel and stared. A queer terror
seized her. She began such a wailing that it aroused others in
Niggertown. At the sound they got out of their beds and came to the
Siner cabin, their eyes big with mystery and fear. At the sight of old
Caroline's motionless body they lifted their voices through the night.

The lamentation carried far beyond the confines of Niggertown. The last
gamblers in the cedar glade heard it, and it broke up their gaming and
drinking. White persons living near the black crescent were waked out of
their sleep and listened to the eerie sound. It rose and fell in the
darkness like a melancholy organ chord. The wailing of the women
quivered against the heavy grief of the men. The half-asleep listeners
were moved by its weirdness to vague and sinister fancies. The dolor
veered away from what the Anglo-Saxon knows as grief and was shot
through with the uncanny and the terrible. White children crawled out of
their small beds and groped their way to their parents. The women
shivered and asked of the darkness, "_What_ makes the negroes howl
so?"

Nobody knew,--least of all, the negroes. Nobody suspected that the
bedlam harked back to the jungle, to black folk in African kraals
beating tom-toms and howling, not in grief, but in an ecstasy of terror
lest the souls of their dead might come back in the form of tigers or
pythons or devils and work woe to the tribe. Through the night the
negroes wailed on, performing through custom an ancient rite of which
they knew nothing. They supposed themselves heartbroken over the death
of Caroline Siner.

Amid this din Peter Siner sat in his room, stunned by the sudden taking
off of his mother. The reproaches that she had expressed to old Captain
Renfrew clung in Peter's brain. The brown man had never before realized
the faint amusement and condesc