“I thought all that out before I came back here, Cissie.  A friend of mine named Farquhar offered me a place with him up in Chicago,—­a string of garages.  You’d like Farquhar, Cissie.  He’s a materialist with an absolutely inexorable brain.  He mechanizes the universe.  I told him I couldn’t take his offer.  ‘It’s like this,’ I argued:  ’if every negro with a little ability leaves the South, our people down there will never progress.’  It’s really that way, Cissie, it takes a certain mental atmosphere to develop a people as a whole.  A few individuals here and there may have the strength to spring up by themselves, but the run of the people—­no.  I believe one of the greatest curses of the colored race in the South is the continual draining of its best individuals North.  Farquhar argued—­” just then Peter saw that Cissie was not attending his discourse.  She was walking at his side in a respectful silence.  He stopped talking, and presently she smiled and said: 

“You haven’t noticed my new brooch, Peter.”  She lifted her hand to her bosom, and twisted the face of the trinket toward him.  “You oughtn’t to have made me show it to you after you recommended it yourself.”  She made a little moue of disappointment.

It was a pretty bit of old gold that complimented the creamy skin.  Peter began admiring it at once, and, negro fashion, rather overstepped the limits white beaux set to their praise, as he leaned close to her.

At the moment the two were passing one of the oddest houses in Niggertown.  It was a two-story cabin built in the shape of a steamboat.  A little cupola represented a pilot-house, and two iron chimneys served for smoke-stacks.

This queer building had been built by a negro stevedore because of a deep admiration for the steamboats on which he had made his living.  Instead of steps at the front door, this boat-like house had a stage-plank.  As Peter strolled down the street with Cissie, admiring her brooch, and suffused with a sense of her nearness, he happened to glance up, and saw Tump Pack walk down the stage-plank, come out, and wait for them at the gate.

There was something grim in the ex-soldier’s face and in the set of his gross lips as the two came up, but the aura of the girl prevented Peter from paying much attention to it.  As the two reached Tump, Peter had just lifted his hand to his hat when Tump made a quick step out at the gate, in front of them, and swung a furious blow at Peter’s head.

Cissie screamed.  Siner staggered back with flames dancing before his eyes.  The soldier lunged after his toppling man with gorilla-like blows.  Hot pains shot through Peter’s body.  His head roared like a gong.  The sunlight danced about him in flashes.  The air was full of black fists smashing him, and not five feet away, the bullet head of Tump Pack bobbed this way and that in the rapid shifts of his attack.  A stab of pain cut off Peter’s breath.  He stood with his diaphragm muscles tense and paralyzed, making convulsive efforts to breathe.  At that moment he glimpsed the convexity of Tump’s stomach.  He drop-kicked at it with foot-ball desperation.  Came a loud explosive groan.  Tump seemed to rise a foot or two in air, turned over, and thudded down on his shoulders in the dust.  The soldier made no attempt to rise, but curled up, twisting in agony.