However, the best men weary in well doing, and for the last few days Hooker’s Bend had switched from its intellectual staple of conversation to consider the comedy of Tump Pack’s undoing.  The incident held undeniably comic elements.  For Tump to start out carrying a forty-four, meaning to blow a rival out of his path, and to wind up hard at work, picking cotton at nothing a day for a man whose offer of three dollars a day he had just refused, certainly held the makings of a farce.

On the heels of this came the news that Peter Siner meant to take advantage of Tump’s arrest and marry Cissie Dildine.  Old Parson Ranson was responsible for the spread of this last rumor.  He had fumbled badly in his effort to hold Peter’s secret.  Not once, but many times, always guarded by a pledge of secrecy, had he revealed the approaching wedding.  When pressed for a date, the old negro said he was “not at lib’ty to tell.”

Up to this point white criticism viewed the stage-setting of the black comedy with the impersonal interest of a box party.  Some of the round table said they believed there would be a dead coon or so before the scrape was over.

Dawson Bobbs, the ponderous constable, went to the trouble to telephone Mr. Cicero Throgmartin, for whom Tump was working, cautioning Throgmartin to make sure that Tump Pack was in the sleeping-shack every night, as he might get wind of the wedding and take a notion to bolt and stop it.  “You know, you can’t tell what a fool nigger’ll do,” finished Bobbs.

Throgmartin was mildly amused, promised the necessary precautions, and said: 

“It looks like Peter has put one over on Tump, and maybe a college education does help a nigger some, after all.”

The constable thought it was just luck.

“Well, I dunno,” said Throgmartin, who was a philosopher, and inclined to view every matter from various angles.  “Peter may of worked this out somehow.”

“Have you heard what Henry Hooker done to Siner in the land deal?”

Throgmartin said he had.

“No, I don’t mean that.  I mean Henry’s last wrinkle in garnisheeing old Ca’line’s estate in his bank for the rest of the purchase money on the Dilihay place.”

There was a pause.

“You don’t mean it!”

“Damn ’f I don’t.”

The constable’s sentence shook with suppressed mirth, and the next moment roars of laughter came over the telephone wire.

“Say, ain’t he the bird!”

“He’s the original early bird.  I’d like to get a snap-shot of the worm that gets away from him.”

Both men laughed heartily again.

“But, say,” objected Throgmartin, who was something of a lawyer himself,—­as, indeed, all Southern men are,—­“I thought the Sons and Daughters of Benevolence owed Hooker, not Peter Siner, nor Ca’line’s estate.”

“Well, it is the Sons and Daughters, but Ca’line was one of ’em, and they ain’t no limited li’bility ’sociation.  Henry can jump on anything any of ’em’s got.  Henry got the Persimmon to bring him a copy of their by-laws.”