When Cissie Dildine returned from jail, she and her mother arranged the Dildine-Siner wedding as nearly according to white standards in similar circumstances as they could conceive.  They agreed that it should be a simple, quiet home wedding.  However, as every soul in Niggertown, a number of colored friends in Jonesboro, and a contingent from up-river villages meant to attend, it became necessary to hold the service in the church.

The officiating minister was not Parson Ranson after all, but a Reverend Cleotus Haidus, the presiding elder of that circuit of the Afro-American Methodist Church, whose duties happened to call him to Hooker’s Bend that day.  So, notwithstanding Cissie’s efforts at simplicity, the wedding, after all, was resolved into an affair.

Once, in one of her moments of clairvoyance, Cissie said to Peter: 

“Our trouble is, Peter, we are trying to mix what I have learned in Nashville and what you have learned in Boston with what we both feel in Hooker’s Bend.  I—­I’m almost ashamed to say it, but I don’t really feel sad and plaintive at all, Peter.  I feel glad, gloriously glad.  Oh, my dear, dear Peter!” and she flung her arms around Peter’s neck and held him with all her might against her ripening bosom.

To Cissie her theft, her jail sentence, her pregnancy, were nothing more than if she had taken a sip of water.  However, with the imitativeness of her race and the histrionic ability of her sex, she appeared pensive and subdued during the elaborate double-ring ceremony performed by the Reverend Cleotus Haidus.  Nobody in the packed church knew how tremendously Cissie’s heart was beating except Peter, who held her hand.

The ethical engine that Peter had patiently builded in Harvard almost ceased to function in this weird morality of Niggertown.  Whether he were doing right or doing wrong, Peter could not determine.  He lost all his moorings.  At times he felt himself walking according to the ethnological law, which is the Harvard way of saying walking according to the will of God; but at other times he felt party to some unpardonable obscenity.  So deeply was he disturbed that out of the dregs of his mind floated up old bits of the Scriptures that he was unaware of possessing:  “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”  And Peter wondered if he were not in that way.

[Illustration:  The bridal couple embarked for Cairo]

The bridal couple embarked for Cairo on the Red Cloud, a packet in the Dubuque, Ohio, and Tennessee River trade.  Peter and Cissie were not allowed to walk up the main stairway into the passengers’ cabin, but were required to pick their way along the boiler-deck, through the stench of freight, lumber, live stock and sleeping roustabouts.  Then they went through the heat and steam of the engine-room up a small companionway that led through the toilet, on to the rear guard of the main deck, and thence back to a little cuddy behind the main saloon called the chambermaid’s cabin.