The cashier picked up the money, casually.  He considered a moment, then reached for a long envelop.  As he did so, the incident with Peter evidently passed from his mind, for his hatchet face lighted up as with some inward illumination.

“Bobbs,” he said warmly, “that was a great sermon Brother Blackwater preached.  It made me want to help according as the Lord has blessed me.  Couldn’t you spare five dollars, Bobbs, to go along with this?”

The constable tried to laugh and wriggle away, but the cashier’s gimlet eyes kept boring him, and eventually he fished out a five-dollar bill and handed it in.  Mr. Hooker placed the two bills in the envelop, sealed it, and handed it to the constable.

“Jest drop that in the post-office as you go down the street, Bobbs,” he directed in his high voice.  Peter caught a glimpse of the type-written address.

It was

Rev. Lemuel Hardiman,
c/o United Missions,
Katuako Post,
Bahr el Ghazal,
Sudan,
East Africa.

CHAPTER III

The white population of Hooker’s Bend was much amused and gratified at the outcome of the Hooker-Siner land deal.  Every one agreed that the cashier’s chicanery was a droll and highly original turn to give to a negro exclusion clause drawn into a deed.  Then, too, it involved several legal points highly congenial to the Hooker’s Bend intellect Could the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence recover their hundred dollars?  Could Henry Hooker force them to pay the remaining seven hundred?  Could not Siner establish his school on the Dillihay place regardless of the clause, since the cashier would be estopped from obtaining an injunction by his own instrument?

As a matter of fact, the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence sent a committee to wait on Mr. Hooker to see what action he meant to take on the notes that paid for his spurious deed.  This brought another harvest of rumors.  Street gossip reported that Henry had compromised for this, that, and the other amount, that he would not compromise, that he had persuaded the fool niggers into signing still other instruments.  Peter never knew the truth.  He was not on the committee.

But high above the legal phase of interest lay the warming fact that Peter Siner, a negro graduate of Harvard, on his first tilt in Hooker’s Bend affairs had ridden to a fall.  This pleased even the village women, whose minds could not follow the subtle trickeries of legal disputation.  The whole affair simply proved what the white village had known all along:  you can’t educate a nigger.  Hooker’s Bend warmed with pleasure that half of its population was ineducable.

White sentiment in Hooker’s Bend reacted strongly on Niggertown.  Peter Siner’s prestige was no more.  The cause of higher education for negroes took a mighty slump.  Junius Gholston, a negro boy who had intended to go to Nashville to attend Fisk University, reconsidered the matter, packed away his good clothes, put on overalls, and shipped down the river as a roustabout instead.