“Whut’s de matter, Ofeely?”

The girl lifted a high voice: 

“Oh, Miss Nan, it’s that constable goin’ th’ugh the houses!” The girl veered across the street to the safety of the open door and one of her own sex.

“Good Lawd!” cried the spiked one in disgust, “ever’, time a white pusson gits somp’n misplaced—­” She moved to one side to allow the girl to enter, and continued staring up the street, with the whites of her eyes accented against her dark face, after the way of angry negroes.

Around the crescent the dogs were furious.  They were Niggertown dogs, and the sight of a white man always drove them to a frenzy.  Presently in the hullabaloo, Peter heard Dawson Bobbs’s voice shouting: 

“Aunt Mahaly, if you kain’t call off this dawg, I’m shore goin’ to kill him.”

Then an old woman’s scolding broke in and complicated the melee.  Presently Peter saw the bulky form of Dawson Bobbs come around the curve, moving methodically from cabin to cabin.  He held some legal-looking papers in his hands, and Peter knew what the constable was doing.  He was serving a blanket search-warrant on the whole black population of Hooker’s Bend.  At almost every cabin a dog ran out to blaspheme at the intruder, but a wave of the man’s pistol sent them yelping under the floors again.

When the constable entered a house, Peter could hear him bumping and rattling among the furnishings, while the black householders stood outside the door and watched him disturb their housekeeping arrangements.

Presently Bobbs came angling across the street toward the Siner cabin.  As he entered the rickety gate, old Caroline called out: 

“Whut is you after, anyway, white man?”

Bobbs turned cold, truculent eyes on the old negress.  “A turkey roaster,” he snapped.  “Some o’ you niggers stole Miss Lou Arkwright’s turkey roaster.”

“Tukky roaster!” cried the old black woman, in great disgust.  “Whut you s’pose us niggers is got to roast in a tukky roaster?”

The constable answered shortly that his business was to find the roaster, not what the negroes meant to put in it.

“I decla’,” satirized old Caroline, savagely, “dish-heah Niggertown is a white man’s pocket.  Ever’ time he misplace somp’n, he feel in his pocket to see ef it ain’t thaiuh.  Don’-chu turn over dat sody-water, white man!  You know dey ain’t no tukky roaster under dat sody-water.  I ‘cla’ ‘fo’ Gawd, ef a white man wuz to eat a flapjack, an’ it did n’ give him de belly-ache, I ‘cla’ ‘fo’ Gawd he’d git out a search-wa’nt to see ef some nigger had n’ stole dat flapjack goin’ down his th’oat.”

“Mr. Bobbs has to do his work, Mother,” put in Peter.  “I don’t suppose he enjoys it any more than we do.”

“Den let ‘im git out’n dis business an’ git in anudder,” scolded the old woman.  “Dis sho is a mighty po’ business.”

The ponderous Mr. Bobbs finished with a practised thoroughness his inspection of the cabin, and then the inquisition proceeded down the street, around the crescent, and so out of sight and eventually out of hearing.