Peter searched about and found the tiny brass night-lamp which his mother always had used.  The larger glass-bowled lamp was gone.  The interior of the cabin was clammy from cold and foul from long lack of airing.  In the corner his mother’s old four-poster loomed in the shadows, but he could see some of its covers had been taken.  He passed into the kitchen with a notion of building a fire and eating a bite, but everything edible had been abstracted.  Even one of the lids of the old step-stove was gone.  Most of the pans and kettles had disappeared, but the pretty old Dutch sugar-bowl remained on a bare paper-covered shelf.  Negro-like, whatever person or persons who had ransacked Peter’s home considered the sugar-bowl too fine to take.  Or they may have thought that Peter would want this bowl for a keepsake, and with that queer compassion that permeates a negro’s worst moments they allowed it to remain.  And Peter knew if he raised an outcry about his losses, much of the property would be surreptitiously restored, or perhaps his neighbors would bring back his things and say they had found them.  They would help him as best they could, just as they of the crescent would help Cissie as best they could, and would receive her back as one of them when she and her baby were finally released from jail.

They were a queer people.  They were a people who would never get on well and do well.  They lacked the steel-like edge that the white man achieves.  By virtue of his hardness, a white man makes his very laws and virtues instruments to crush and mulct his fellow-man; but negroes are so softened by untoward streaks of sympathy that they lose the very uses of their crimes.

The depression of the whole day settled upon Peter with the deepening night.  He held his poor light above his head and picked his way to his own room.  After the magnificence of the Renfrew manor, it had contracted to a grimy little box lined with yellowed papers.  His books were still intact, but Henry Hooker would get them as part payment on the Dillihay place, which Henry owned.  On his little table still lay the pile of old examination papers, lists of incoherent questions which somebody somewhere imagined formed a test of human ability to meet and answer the mysterious searchings of life.

Peter was familiar with the books; many of the questions he had learned by rote, but the night and the crescent, and the thought of a pregnant girl caged in the blackness of a jail filled his soul with a great melancholy query to which he could find no answer.

CHAPTER XIX

Two voices talking, interrupting each other with ejaculations, after the fashion of negroes under excitement, aroused Peter Siner from his sleep.  He caught the words:  “He did!  Tump did!  The jailer did!  ‘Fo’ God! black man, whut’s Cissie doin’?”

Overtones of shock, even of horror, in the two voices brought Peter wide awake the moment he opened his eyes.  He sat up suddenly in his bed, remained perfectly still, listening with his mouth open.  The voices, however, were passing.  The words became indistinct, then relapsed into that bubbling monotone of human voices at a distance, and presently ceased.