The old negro preacher rose, too, a little behind Jim Pink.

“Now, boys! boys!” he placated.  “You jes think dat, Persimmon.”

“Yeah,” admitted Persimmon, “I jes think it; but ef I b’lieve ever’thing is so whut I think is so, I’d part Jim Pink’s wool wid a brickbat.”

Parson Ranson tried to make peace, but the Persimmon spread his hands in a gesture that included the three men.  “Now, I ain’t sayin’ nothin’,” he stated solemnly, “an’ I ain’t makin’ no threats; but ef anything happens, you-all kain’t say that nobody didn’ tell nobody about nothin’.”

With this the Persimmon walked to the gate, let himself out, still looking back at Jim Pink, and then started down the dusty street.

Mr. Staggs seemed uncomfortable under the Persimmon’s protruding yellow stare, but finally, when the roustabout was gone, he shrugged, regained his aplomb, and remarked that some niggers spent their time in studyin’ ’bout things they hadn’t no info’mation on whatever.  Then he strolled off up the crescent in the other direction.

All this would have made fair minstrel patter if Peter Siner had shared the white conviction that every emotion expressed in a negro’s patois is humorous.  Unfortunately, Peter was too close to the negroes to hold such a tenet.  He knew this quarrel was none the less rancorous for having been couched in the queer circumlocution of black folk.  And behind it all shone the background of racial promiscuity out of which it sprang.  It was like looking at an open sore that touched all of Niggertown, men and boys, young girls and women.  It caused tragedies, murders, fights, and desertions in the black village as regularly as the rotation of the calendar; yet there was no public sentiment against it.  Peter wondered how this attitude of his whole people could possibly be.

With the query the memory of Ida May came back to him, with its sense of dim pathos.  It seemed to Peter now as if their young and uninstructed hands had destroyed a safety-vault to filch a penny.

The reflex of a thought of Ida May always brought Peter to Cissie; it always stirred up in him a desire to make this young girl’s path gentle and smooth.  There was a fineness, a delicacy about Cissie, that, it seemed to Peter, Ida May had never possessed.  Then, too, Cissie was moved by a passion for self-betterment.  She deserved a cleaner field than the Niggertown of Hooker’s Bend.

Peter took Parson Ranson’s arm, and the two moved to the gate by common consent.  It was no longer pleasant to sit here.  The quarrel they had heard somehow had flavored their surroundings.

Peter turned his steps mechanically northward up the crescent toward the Dildine cabin.  Nothing now restrained him from calling on Cissie; he would keep no dinner waiting; he would not be warned and berated on his return home.  The nagging, jealous love of his mother had ended.