reen-black depth of the glade, which set in about
half-way up the hill they were climbing.

"Ef this weather don' ever break," he observed sagely, "we sho am in fuh
a dry spell."

Peter did not pursue the topic of the weather. He climbed the hill in
silence, wondering just what the buffoon meant. He suspected he was
hinting at Cissie's visit to his room. However, he did not dare ask any
questions or press the point in any manner, lest he commit himself.

The minstrel had succeeded in making Peter's walk very uncomfortable, as
somehow he always did. Peter went on thinking about the matter. If Jim
Pink knew of Cissie's visit, all Niggertown knew it. No woman's
reputation, nobody's shame or misery or even life, would stand between
Jim Pink and what he considered a joke. The buffoon was the crudest
thing in this world--a man who thought himself a wit.

Peter could imagine all the endless tweaks to Cissie's pride Niggertown
would give the octoroon. She had asked Peter to marry her and had been
refused. She had humbled herself for naught. That was the very tar of
shame. Peter knew that in the moral categories of Niggertown Cissie
would suffer more from such a rebuff than if she had lied or committed
theft and adultery every day in the calendar. She had been refused
marriage. All the folk-ways of Niggertown were utterly topsyturvy. It
was a crazy-house filled with the most grotesque moral measures.

It seemed to Peter as he entered the cedar-glade that he had lost all
sympathy with this people from which he had sprung. He looked upon them
as strange, incomprehensible beings, just as a man will forget his own
childhood and look upon children as strange, incomprehensible little
creatures. In the midst of his thoughts he heard himself saying to Jim
Pink:

"I suppose it is as dusty as ever."

"Dustier 'an ever," assured Jim Pink.

Apparently their conversation had recurred to the weather, after all.

A chill silence encompassed the glade. The path the negroes followed
wound this way and that among reddish boulders, between screens of
intergrown cedars, and over a bronze mat of needles. Their steps were
noiseless. The odor of the cedars and the temple-like stillness brought
to Peter's mind the night of his mother's death. It seemed to him a long
time since he had come running through the glade after a doctor, and
yet, by a queer distortion of his sense of time, his mother's death and
burial bulked in his past as if it had