Something warm and melting moved in Peter Siner’s breast.  He caressed his mother and murmured incoherently, as had Tump Pack.  Presently the master of the launch came by, and touched the old negress, not ungently, with the end of a spike-pole.

“You’ll have to move, Aunt Ca’line,” he said.  “We’re goin’ to get the freight off now.”

The black woman paused in her weeping.  “Yes, Mass’ Bob,” she said, and she and Peter moved off of the launch onto the wharf-boat.

The Knights and Ladies of Tabor were already up the river bank with their hero.  Peter and his mother were left alone.  Now they walked around the guards of the wharf-boat to the bank, holding each other’s arms closely.  As they went, Peter kept looking down at his old black mother, with a growing tenderness.  She was so worn and heavy!  He recognized the very dress she wore, an old black silk which she had “washed out” for Miss Patti Brownell when he was a boy.  It had been then, it was now, her best dress.  During the years the old negress had registered her increasing bulk by letting out seams and putting in panels.  Some of the panels did not agree with the original fabric either in color or in texture and now the seams were stretching again and threatening a rip.  Peter’s own immaculate clothes reproached him, and he wondered for the hundredth, or for the thousandth time how his mother had obtained certain remittances which she had forwarded him during his college years.

As Peter and his mother crept up the bank of the river, stopping occasionally to let the old negress rest, his impression of the meanness and shabbiness of the whole village grew.  From the top of the bank the single business street ran straight back from the river.  It was stony in places, muddy in places, strewn with goods-boxes, broken planking, excelsior, and straw that had been used for packing.  Charred rubbish-piles lay in front of every store, which the clerks had swept out and attempted to burn.  Hogs roamed the thoroughfare, picking up decaying fruit and parings, and nosing tin cans that had been thrown out by the merchants.  The stores that Peter had once looked upon as show-places were poor two-story brick or frame buildings, defiled by time and wear and weather.  The white merchants were coatless, listless men who sat in chairs on the brick pavements before their stores and who moved slowly when a customer entered their doors.

And, strange to say, it was this fall of his white townsmen that moved Peter Siner with a sense of the greatest loss.  It seemed fantastic to him, this sudden land-slide of the mighty.

As Peter and his mother came over the brow of the river bank, they saw a crowd collecting at the other end of the street.  The main street of Hooker’s Bend is only a block long, and the two negroes could easily hear the loud laughter of men hurrying to the focus of interest and the blurry expostulations of negro voices.  The laughter spread like a contagion.  Merchants as far up as the river corner became infected, and moved toward the crowd, looking back over their shoulders at every tenth or twelfth step to see that no one entered their doors.