“I jes made some salmon coquettes fuh you whut’ll spile ef you don’ eat ’em now.”

“I didn’t know you were making croquettes,” said Peter, with polite interest.

“Well, I is.  I gotta can o’ salmon fum Miss Mollie Brownell she’d opened an’ couldn’t quite use.  I doctered ’em up wid a lil vinegar an’ sody, an’ dey is ’bout as pink as dey ever wuz.”

A certain uneasiness and annoyance came over Peter at this persistent use of unwholesome foods.

“Look here, Mother, you’re not using old canned goods that have been left over?”

The old negress stood looking at him in silence, but lost her coaxing expression.

“I’ve told and told you about using any tainted or impure foods that the white people can’t eat.”

“Well, whut ef you is?”

“If it’s too bad for them, it’s too bad for you!”

Caroline made a careless gesture.

“Good Lawd, boy!  I don’ ’speck to eat whut’s good fuh me!  All I says is, ‘Grub, keep me alive.  Ef you do dat, you done a good day’s wuck.’”

Peter was disgusted and shocked at his mother’s flippancy.  Modern colleges are atheistic, but they do exalt three gods,—­food, cleanliness, and exercise.  Now here was Peter’s mother blaspheming one of his trinity.

“I wish you ’d let me know when you want anything Mother.  I’ll get it fresh for you.”  His words were filial enough, but his tone carried his irritation.

The old negress turned back to the kitchen.

“Huh, boy! you been fotch up on lef’-overs,” she said, and disappeared through the door.

Peter walked to the gate, let himself out, and started off on his constitutional.  His tiff with his mother renewed all his nervousness and sense of failure.  His litany of mistakes renewed their dolor in his mind.

An autumn wind was blowing, and long plumes of dust whisked up out of the curving street and swept over the ill-kept yards, past the cabins, and toward the sere fields and chromatic woods.  The wind beat at the brown man; the dust whispered against his clothes, made him squint his eyes to a crack and tickled his nostrils at each breath.

When Peter had gone two or three hundred yards, he became aware that somebody was walking immediately behind him.  Tump Pack popped into his mind.  He looked over his shoulder and then turned.  Through the veils of flying dust he made out some one, and a moment later identified not Tump Pack, but the gangling form of Jim Pink Staggs, clad in a dark-blue sack-coat and white flannel trousers with pin stripes.  It was the sort of costume affected by interlocutors of minstrel shows; it had a minstrel trigness about it.

As a matter of fact, Jim Pink was a sort of semi-professional minstrel.  Ordinarily, he ran a pressing-shop in the Niggertown crescent, but occasionally he impressed all the dramatic talent of Niggertown and really did take the road with a minstrel company.  These barn-storming expeditions reached down into Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.  Sometimes they proved a great success, and the darkies rode back several hundred dollars ahead.  Sometimes they tramped back.