er's Bank and
there awaited Mr. Henry Hooker, the cashier. Presently a skinny man
detached himself from the church crowd and came angling across the dirty
street toward the bank. Mr. Hooker wore somewhat shabby clothes for a
banker; in fact, he never could recover from certain personal habits
formed during a penurious boyhood. He had a thin hatchet face which just
at this moment was shining though from some inward glow. Although he was
an unhandsome little man, his expression was that of one at peace with
man and God and was pleasant to see. He had been so excited by the
minister that he was constrained to say something even to two negroes.
So as he unlocked the little one-story bank, he told Tump and Peter that
he had been listening to a man who was truly a man of God. He said
Blackwater could touch the hardest heart, and, sure enough, Mr. Hooker's
rather popped and narrow-set eyes looked as though he had been crying.

All this encomium was given in a high, cracked voice as the cashier
opened the door and turned the negroes into the bank. Tump, who stood
with his hat off, listening to all the cashier had to say, said he
thought so, too.

The shabby interior of the little bank, the shabby little banker,
renewed that sense of disillusion that pervaded Peter's home-coming. In
Boston the mulatto had done his slight banking business in a white
marble structure with tellers of machine-like briskness and neatness.

Mr. Hooker strolled around into his grill-cage; when he was thoroughly
ensconced he began business in his high voice:

"You came to see me about that land, Peter?"

Yes, sir."

"Sorry to tell you, Peter, you are not back in time to get the Tomwit
place."

Peter came out of his musing over the Boston banks with a sense of
bewilderment.

"How's that? why, I bought that land--"

"But you paid nothing for your option, Siner."

"I had a clear-cut understanding with Mr. Tomwit--"

Mr. Hooker smiled a smile that brought out sharp wrinkles around the
thin nose on his thin face.

"You should have paid him an earnest, Siner, if you wanted to bind your
trade. You colored folks are always stumbling over the law."

Peter stared through the grating, not knowing what to do.

"I'll go see Mr. Tomwit," he said, and started uncertainly for the door.

The cashier's falsetto stopped him:

"No use, Peter. Mr. Tomwit surprised me, too, but no use talking about
it. I didn't like to see such an important thing as the e