When he reached Main Street, Peter found the whole business portion virtually deserted.  All the stores were closed, and in every show-window stood a printed notice that no business would be transacted between the hours of two and three o’clock in the afternoon during the two weeks of revival then in progress.  Beside this notice stood another card, giving the minister’s text for the current day.  On this particular day it read: 

Go Ye into all the world

Come hear Rev. E.B.  Blackwater’s great
Missionary Address on

ChristianizingAfrica

Eloquent<
/i>, profound, heart-searching. 
Illustrated with slides.

Half a dozen negroes lounged in the sunshine on Hobbett’s corner as Peter came up.  They were amusing themselves after the fashion of blacks, with mock fights, feints, sudden wrestlings.  They would seize one another by the head and grind their knuckles into one another’s wool.  Occasionally, one would leap up and fall into one of those grotesque shuffles called “breakdowns.”  It all held a certain rawness, an irrepressible juvenility.

As Peter came up, Tump Pack detached himself from the group and gave a pantomime of thrusting.  He was clearly reproducing the action which had won for him his military medal.  Then suddenly he fell down in the dust and writhed.  He was mimicking with a ghastly realism the death-throes of his four victims.  His audience howled with mirth at this dumb show of the bayonet-fight and of killing four men.  Tump himself got up out of the dust with tears of laughter in his eyes.  Peter caught the end of his sentence, “Sho put it to ’em, black boy.  Fo’ white men—­”

His audience roared again, swayed around, and pounded one another in an excess of mirth.

Siner shouted from across the street two or three times before he caught Tump’s attention.  The ex-soldier looked around, sobered abruptly.

“Whut-chu want, nigger?” His inquiry was not over-cordial.

Peter nodded him across the street.

The heavily built black in khaki hesitated a moment, then started across the street with the dragging feet of a reluctant negro.  Peter looked at him as he came up.

“What’s the matter, Tump?” he asked playfully.

“Ain’t nothin’ matter wid me, nigger.”  Peter made a guess at Tump’s surliness.

“Look here, are you puffed up because Cissie Dildine struck you for a ten?”

Tump’s expression changed.

“Is she struck me fuh a ten?”

“Yes; on that school subscription.”

“Is dat whut you two niggers wuz a-talkin’ ‘bout over thaiuh in yo’ house?”

“Exactly.”  Peter showed the list, with Cissie’s name on it.  “She told me to collect from you.”

Tump brightened up.

“So dat wuz whut you two niggers wuz a-talkin’ ‘bout over at yo’ house.”  He ran a fist down into his khaki, and drew out three or four one-dollar bills and about a pint of small change.  It was the usual crap-shooter’s offering.  The two negroes sat down on the ramshackle porch of an old jeweler’s shop, and Tump began a complicated tally of ten dollars.