“Such me.”

“Why did that boy go running across like that?”

Jim Pink rolled his eyes on Peter with a peculiar look.

“Reckon he mus’ ‘a’ wanted to git on t’other side o’ town.”

Peter flattered the Punchinello by smiling a little.

“Come, Jim Pink, what do you know?” he asked.  The magician poked out his huge lips.

“Mr. Bobbs turn acrost by de church, over de Big Hill.  Da’ ’s always a ba-ad sign.”

Peter’s brief interest in the matter flickered out.  Another arrest for some niggerish peccadillo.  The history of Niggertown was one long series of petty offenses, petty raids, and petty punishments.  Peter would be glad to get well away from such a place.

“Think I’ll go North, Jim Pink,” remarked Peter, chiefly to keep up a friendly conversation with his companion.

“Whut-chu goin’ to do up thaiuh?”

“Take a position in a system of garages.”

“A position is a job wid a white color on it,” defined the minstrel.  “Whut you goin’ to do wid Cissie?”

Peter looked around at the foolish face.

“With Cissie?—­Cissie Dildine?”

“Uh huh.”

“Why, what makes you think I’m going to do anything with Cissie?”

“M-m, visitin’ roun’.”  The fool flung his face into a grimace, and dropped it as one might shake out a sack.

Peter watched the contortion uneasily.

“What do you mean—­visiting around?”

   “Diff’nt folks go visitin’ roun’;
    Some goes up an’ some goes down.”

Apparently Jim Pink had merely quoted a few words from a poem he knew.  He stared at the green-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.