Presently he surprised himself by calling over his shoulder, as a sort of complaint: 

“How came you with the pistol, Tump?  Thought it was against the law to carry one.”

“You kin ca’y ’em ef you don’ keep ’em hid,” explained the ex-soldier in a wooden voice.  “Mr. Bobbs tol’ me dat when he guv my gun back.”

The irony of the thing caught Peter, for the authorities to arrest Tump not because he was trying to kill Peter, but because he went about his first attempt in an illegal manner.  For the first time in his life the mulatto felt that contempt for a white man’s technicalities that flavors every negro’s thoughts.  Here for thirty days his life had been saved by a technical law of the white man; at the end of the thirty days, by another technical law, Tump was set at liberty and allowed to carry a weapon, in a certain way, to murder him.  It was grotesque; it was absurd.  It filled Peter with a sudden violent questioning of the whole white regime.  His thoughts danced along in peculiar excitement.

At the turn of the hill the trio came in sight of the squalid semicircle of Niggertown.  Here and there from a tumbledown chimney a feather of pale wood smoke lifted into the chill sunshine.  The sight of the houses brought Peter a sharp realization that his life would end in the curving street beneath him.  A shock at the incomprehensible brevity of his life rushed over him.  Just to that street, just as far as the curve, and his legs were swinging along, carrying him forward at an even gait.

All at once he began talking, arguing.  He tried to speak at an ordinary tempo, but his words kept edging on faster and faster: 

“Tump, I’m not going to marry Cissie Dildine.”

“I knows you ain’t, Peter.”

“I mean, if you let me alone, I didn’t mean to.”

“I ain’t goin’ to let you alone.”

“Tump, we had already decided not to marry.”

After a short pause Tump said in a slightly different tone: 

“‘Pears lak you don’ haf to ma’y her—­comin’ to yo’ room.”

A queer sinking came over the mulatto.  “Listen, Tump, I—­we—­in my room —­we simply talked, that’s all.  She came to tell me she was goin away.  I—­I didn’t harm her, Tump.”  Peter swallowed.  He despaired of being believed.

But his defense only infuriated the soldier.  He suddenly broke into violent profanity.

“Hot damn you! shut yo black mouf!  Whut I keer whut-chu done!  You weaned her away fum me.  She won’t speak to me!  She won’t look at me!” A sudden insanity of rage seized Tump.  He poured on his victim every oath and obscenity he had raked out of the whole army.

Strangely enough, the gunman’s outbreak brought a kind of relief to Peter Siner.  It exonerated him.  He was not suspected of wronging Cissie; or, rather, whether he had or had not wronged her made no difference to Tump.  Peter’s crime consisted in mere being, in existing where Cissie could see him and desire him rather than Tump.  Why it calmed Peter to know that Tump held no dishonorable charge against him the mulatto himself could not have told.  Tump’s violence showed Peter the certainty of his own death, and somehow it washed away the hope and the thought of escape.