The launch clacked on and on interminably.  Sometimes it seemed to make no headway at all against the heavy, silty current.  Tump Pack, the white captain, and the negro engineer began a game of craps in the negro cabin.  Presently, two of the white drummers came in from the white cabin and began betting on the throws.  The game was listless.  The master of the launch pointed out places along the shores where wildcat stills were located.  The crap-shooters, negro and white, squatted in a circle on the cabin floor, snapping their fingers and calling their points monotonously.  One of the negro girls in the negro cabin took an apple out of her lunch sack and began eating it, holding it in her palm after the fashion of negroes rather than in her fingers, as is the custom of white women.

Both doors of the engine-room were open, and Peter Siner could see through into the white cabin.  The old hill woman was dozing in her chair, her bonnet bobbing to each stroke of the engines.  The youngish man and the girl were engaged in some sort of intimate lovers’ dispute.  When the engines stopped at one of the landings, Peter discovered she was trying to pay him what he had spent on getting her baggage trucked down at Perryville.  The girl kept pressing a bill into the man’s hand, and he avoided receiving the money.  They kept up the play for sake of occasional contacts.

When the launch came in sight of Hooker’s Bend toward the middle of the afternoon, Peter Siner experienced one of the profoundest surprises of his life.  Somehow, all through his college days he had remembered Hooker’s Bend as a proud town with important stores and unapproachable white residences.  Now he saw a skum of negro cabins, high piles of lumber, a sawmill, and an ice-factory.  Behind that, on a little rise, stood the old Brownell manor, maintaining a certain shabby dignity in a grove of oaks.  Behind and westward from the negro shacks and lumber-piles ranged the village stores, their roofs just visible over the top of the bank.  Moored to the shore, lay the wharf-boat in weathered greens and yellows.  As a background for the whole scene rose the dark-green height of what was called the “Big Hill,” an eminence that separated the negro village on the east from the white village on the west.  The hill itself held no houses, but appeared a solid green-black with cedars.

The ensemble was merely another lonely spot on the south bank of the great somnolent river.  It looked dead, deserted, a typical river town, unprodded even by the hoot of a jerk-water railroad.

As the launch chortled toward the wharf, Peter Siner stood trying to orient himself to this unexpected and amazing minifying of Hooker’s Bend.  He had left a metropolis; he was coming back to a tumble-down village.  Yet nothing was changed.  Even the two scraggly locust-trees that clung perilously to the brink of the river bank still held their toe-hold among the strata of limestone.