He started inside, when the levy notice on the door again met his eyes.  He paused, read it over once more, and decided that he must go over the hill to the Planter’s Bank and get Henry Hooker’s permission to remove certain small personal belongings that he wanted to take with him.

The mere clear-cut decision to go invigorated Peter.

Some of the energy that always filled him during his college days in Boston seemed to come to him now from the mere thought of the North.  Soon he would be in the midst of it, moving briskly, talking to wide-awake men to whom a slightly unusual English word would not form a stumbling-block to conversation.  He set out down the crescent and across the Big Hill at a swinging stride.  He was glad to get away.

Beyond the white church on the other side of the hill he heard a motor coming in on the Jonesboro road.  Presently he saw a battered car moving around the long swing of the pike, spewing a trail of dust down the wind.  Its clacking became prodigious.

The mulatto was just entering that indefinite stretch of thoroughfare where a country road becomes a village street when there came a wail of brakes behind him and he looked around.

It was Dawson Bobbs’s car.  The fat man now slowed up not far from the mulatto and called to him.

“Yes, sir,” said Peter.

Dawson bobbed his fat head backward and upward in a signal for Peter to approach.  It held the casualness of one certain to be obeyed.

Although Peter had done no crime, nor had even harbored a criminal intention, a trickle of apprehension went through him at Bobbs’s nod.  He recalled Jim Pink’s saying that it was bad luck to see the constable.  He walked up to the shuddering motor and stood about three feet from the running-board.

The officer bit on a sliver of toothpick that he held in his thin lips.

“Accident up Jonesboro las’ night, Peter.”

“What was it, Mr. Bobbs?”

“Tump Pack got killed.”

Peter continued looking fixedly at Mr. Bobbs’s broad red face.  The dusty road beneath him seemed to give a little dip.  He repeated the information emptily, trying to orient himself to this sudden change in his whole mental horizon.

The officer was looking at Peter fixedly with his chill slits of eyes.

“Yeah; trying to make a jail delivery.”

The two men continued looking at each other, one from the road, the other from the motor.  The flow of Peter’s thoughts seemed to divide.  The greater part was occupied with Tump Pack.  Peter could vision the formidable ex-soldier lying dead in Jonesboro jail, with his little congressional medal on his breast.  Some lighter portion of his mind nickered about here and there on trivial things.  He observed a little hole rusted in the running-board of the motor.  He noticed that the officer’s eyes were just the same chill, washed blue as the winter sky above his head.  He remembered a tale that, before electrocution became a law in Tennessee the county sheriff’s nerve had failed him at a hanging, and the constable Dawson Bobbs had sprung the drop.  There was something terrible about the fat man.  He would do anything, absolutely anything, that came to his hands in the way of legal sewage.