ellowish tooth. At the
moment his machine started slowly forward. It gave him the appearance of
accidentally rolling off while immersed in deep thought.

* * * * *

The death of Tump Pack moved Peter with a sense of strange pathos. He
always remembered Tump tramping away through the night to carry Cissie
some underclothes and, if possible, to take her place in jail. At the
foundation of Tump's being lay a faithfulness and devotion to Cissie
that reached the heights of a dog's. And yet, he might have deserted
her, he would probably have beaten her, and he most certainly would have
betrayed her many, many times. It was inexplicable.

Now that Tump was dead, the mantle of his fidelity somehow seemed to
fall on Peter. For some reason Peter felt that he should assume Tump's
place as Cissie Dildine's husband and protector. Had Tump lived, Peter
might have gone North in peace, if not in happiness. Now such a journey,
without Cissie, had become impossible. He had a feeling that it would
not be right.

As for the disgrace of marrying such a woman as Cissie Dildine, Peter
slowly gave that idea up. The "worthinesses" and "disgraces" implicit in
Harvard atmosphere, which Peter had spent four years of his life
imbibing, slowly melted away in the air of Niggertown. What was
honorable there, what was disgraceful there, somehow changed its color
here.

By virtue of this change Peter felt intuitively that Cissie Dildine was
neither disgraced by her arrest nor soiled by her physical condition.
Somehow she seemed just as "nice" a girl, just as "good" a girl, as ever
she was before. Moreover, every other darky in Niggertown held these
same instinctive beliefs. Had it not been for that, Peter would have
thought it was his passion pleading for the girl, justifying itself by a
grotesque morality, as passions often do. But this was not the correct
solution. The sentiment was enigmatic. Peter puzzled over it time and
time again as he waited in Hooker's Bend for the outcome of Cissie's
trial.

The octoroon's imprisonment came to an end on the third day after Tump's
death. Sam Arkwright's parents had not known of their son's legal
proceedings, and Mr. Arkwright immediately quashed the warrant, and
hushed up the unfortunate matter as best he could. Young Sam was
suddenly sent away from home to college, as the best step in the
circumstances. And so the wishes of the adolescent in the cedar-glade