By the time he had his dimes, quarters, and nickels in separate stacks, services in the village church were finished, and the congregation came filing up the street.  First came the school-children, running and chattering and swinging their books by the straps; then the business men of the hamlet, rather uncomfortable in coats and collars, hurrying back to their stores; finally came the women, surrounding the preacher.

Tump and Peter walked on up to the entrance of the Planter’s Bank and there awaited Mr. Henry Hooker, the cashier.  Presently a skinny man detached himself from the church crowd and came angling across the dirty street toward the bank.  Mr. Hooker wore somewhat shabby clothes for a banker; in fact, he never could recover from certain personal habits formed during a penurious boyhood.  He had a thin hatchet face which just at this moment was shining though from some inward glow.  Although he was an unhandsome little man, his expression was that of one at peace with man and God and was pleasant to see.  He had been so excited by the minister that he was constrained to say something even to two negroes.  So as he unlocked the little one-story bank, he told Tump and Peter that he had been listening to a man who was truly a man of God.  He said Blackwater could touch the hardest heart, and, sure enough, Mr. Hooker’s rather popped and narrow-set eyes looked as though he had been crying.

All this encomium was given in a high, cracked voice as the cashier opened the door and turned the negroes into the bank.  Tump, who stood with his hat off, listening to all the cashier had to say, said he thought so, too.

The shabby interior of the little bank, the shabby little banker, renewed that sense of disillusion that pervaded Peter’s home-coming.  In Boston the mulatto had done his slight banking business in a white marble structure with tellers of machine-like briskness and neatness.

Mr. Hooker strolled around into his grill-cage; when he was thoroughly ensconced he began business in his high voice: 

“You came to see me about that land, Peter?”

Yes, sir.”

“Sorry to tell you, Peter, you are not back in time to get the Tomwit place.”

Peter came out of his musing over the Boston banks with a sense of bewilderment.

“How’s that? why, I bought that land—­”

“But you paid nothing for your option, Siner.”

“I had a clear-cut understanding with Mr. Tomwit—­”

Mr. Hooker smiled a smile that brought out sharp wrinkles around the thin nose on his thin face.

“You should have paid him an earnest, Siner, if you wanted to bind your trade.  You colored folks are always stumbling over the law.”

Peter stared through the grating, not knowing what to do.

“I’ll go see Mr. Tomwit,” he said, and started uncertainly for the door.

The cashier’s falsetto stopped him: 

“No use, Peter.  Mr. Tomwit surprised me, too, but no use talking about it.  I didn’t like to see such an important thing as the education of our colored people held up, myself.  I’ve been thinking about it.”