unch. The doings of
Tump Pack and Cissie Dildine were, after all, nothing to him.

He started inside, when the levy notice on the door again met his eyes.
He paused, read it over once more, and decided that he must go over the
hill to the Planter's Bank and get Henry Hooker's permission to remove
certain small personal belongings that he wanted to take with him.

The mere clear-cut decision to go invigorated Peter.

Some of the energy that always filled him during his college days in
Boston seemed to come to him now from the mere thought of the North.
Soon he would be in the midst of it, moving briskly, talking to wide-
awake men to whom a slightly unusual English word would not form a
stumbling-block to conversation. He set out down the crescent and across
the Big Hill at a swinging stride. He was glad to get away.

Beyond the white church on the other side of the hill he heard a motor
coming in on the Jonesboro road. Presently he saw a battered car moving
around the long swing of the pike, spewing a trail of dust down the
wind. Its clacking became prodigious.

The mulatto was just entering that indefinite stretch of thoroughfare
where a country road becomes a village street when there came a wail of
brakes behind him and he looked around.

It was Dawson Bobbs's car. The fat man now slowed up not far from the
mulatto and called to him.

"Yes, sir," said Peter.

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'