“Well, I swear!  Say, if Henry wasn’t kind of held back by his religion, he’d use a gun, wouldn’t he?”

“I dunno.  I can say this for Henry’s religion:  ’It’s jest like Henry’s wife,—­it’s the dearest thing to his heart; he’d give his life for it, but it don’t do nobody a damn bit of good except jest Henry.’”

The constable’s little eyes twinkled as he heard Throgmartin roaring with laughter and sputtering appreciative oaths.

At that moment a ringing of the bell jarred the ears of both telephonists.  A voice asked for Dr. Jallup.  It was an ill time to interrupt two gentlemen.  The flair of a jest is lost in a pause.  The officer stated sharply that he was the constable of Wayne County and was talking business about the county’s prisoners.  His tone was so charged with consequence that the voice that wanted a doctor apologized hastily and ceased.

Came a pause in which neither man found anything to say.  Laughter is like that,—­a gay bubble that a touch will destroy.  Presently Bobbs continued, gravely enough: 

“Talking about Siner, he’s stayin’ up at old man Renfrew’s now.”

“’At so?”

“Old Rose Hobbett swears he’s doin’ some sort of writin’ up there and livin’ in one of the old man’s best rooms.”

“Hell he is!”

“Yeah?” the constable’s voice questioned Throgmartin’s opinion about such heresy and expressed his own.

“D’ recken it’s so?  Old Rose is such a thief and a liar.”

“Nope,” declared the constable, “the old nigger never would of made up a lie like that,—­never would of thought of it.  Old Cap’n Renfrew’s gettin’ childish; this nigger’s takin’ advantage of it.  Down at the liver’-stable the boys were talkin’ about Siner goin’ to git married, an’ dern if old man Renfrew didn’t git cut up about it!”

“Well,” opined Throgmartin, charitably, “the old man livin’ there all by himself—­I reckon even a nigger is some comp’ny.  They’re funny damn things, niggers is; never know a care nor trouble.  Lord!  I wish I was as care-free as they are!”

“Don’t you, though!” agreed the constable, with the weight of the white man’s burden on his shoulders.  For this is a part of the Southern credo,—­that all negroes are gay, care-free, and happy, and that if one could only be like the negroes, gay, care-free, and happy—­Ah, if one could only be like the negroes!

None of this gossip reached Peter directly, but a sort of back-wash did catch him keenly through young Sam Arkwright and serve as a conundrum for several days.

One morning Peter was bringing an armful of groceries up the street to the old manor, and he met the boy coming in the opposite direction.  The negro’s mind was centered on a peculiar problem he had found in the Renfrew library, so, according to a habit he had acquired in Boston, he took the right-hand side of the pavement, which chanced to be the inner side.  This violated a Hooker’s-Bend convention, which decrees that when a white and a black meet on the sidewalk, the black man invariably shall take the outer side.