None of this juvenile outbreak of questions required answers.  Peter stood looking at the hobbledehoy without smiling.

“Aren’t you going to school?” he asked.

Arkwright shrugged.

“Aw, hell!” he said self-consciously.  “We got marched down to the protracted meetin’ while ago—­whole school did.  My seat happened to be close to a window.  When they all stood up to sing, I crawled out and skipped.  Don’t mention that, Siner.”

“I won’t.”

“When a fellow goes to college he don’t git marched to preachin’, does he, Siner?”

“I never did.”

“We-e-ll,” mused young Sam, doubtfully, “you’re a nigger.”

“I never saw any white men marched in, either.”

“Oh, hell!  I wish I was in college.”

“What are you sitting out here thinking about?” inquired Peter of the ingenuous youngster.

“Oh—­football and—­women and God and—­how to stack cards.  You think about ever’thing, in the woods.  Damn it!  I got to git out o’ this little jay town.  D’ reckon I could git in the navy, Siner?”

“Don’t see why you couldn’t, Sam.  Have you seen Tump Pack anywhere?”

“Yeah; on Hobbett’s corner.  Say, is Cissie Dildine at home?”

“I believe she is.”

“She cooks for us,” explained young Arkwright, “and Mammy wants her to come and git supper, too.”

The phrase “get supper, too,” referred to the custom in the white homes of Hooker’s Bend of having only two meals cooked a day, breakfast and the twelve-o’clock dinner, with a hot supper optional with the mistress.

Peter nodded, and passed on up the path, leaving young Arkwright seated on the ledge of rock, a prey to all the boiling, erratic impulses of adolescence.  The negro sensed some of the innumerable difficulties of this white boy’s life, and once, as he walked on over the silent needles, he felt an impulse to turn back and talk to young Sam Arkwright, to sit down and try to explain to the youth what he could of this hazardous adventure called Life.  But then, he reflected, very likely the boy would be offended at a serious talk from a negro.  Also, he thought that young Arkwright, being white, was really not within the sphere of his ministry.  He, Peter Siner, was a worker in the black world of the South.  He was part of the black world which the white South was so meticulous to hide away, to keep out of sight and out of thought.

A certain vague sense of triumph trickled through some obscure corner of Peter’s mind.  It was so subtle that Peter himself would have been the first, in all good faith, to deny it and to affirm that all his motives were altruistic.  Once he looked back through the cedars.  He could still see the boy hunched over, chin in fist, staring at the mat of needles.

As Peter turned the brow of the Big Hill, he saw at its eastern foot the village church, a plain brick building with a decaying spire.  Its side was perforated by four tall arched windows.  Each was a memorial window of stained glass, which gave the building a black look from the outside.  As Peter walked down the hill toward the church he heard the and somewhat nasal singing of uncultivated voices mingled with the snoring of a reed organ.