Peter lay on his straw bed before the fire, sleepily watching Neptune finish his prayers.  He still had a child’s faith, but he was beginning to wonder how a laboring negro could retain it.  One thing he was sure of; if there was such a thing as a Christian man, endowed with ideal Christian virtues, that old man kneeling in his cabin, pouring out his heart to his Maker, was a Christian.  And remembering comfortable, complacent white Christians—­well fed, well housed, well clothed; with education and all that it implies as their heritage; with all the high things of the world open to them by reason of their white skin; praying decorously every Sunday to a white man’s God—­Peter felt confused.  How should the white man and the white man’s God answer and account to the Daddy Neptunes, who had been “born in slaveryment,” had lived and would die in slaveryment to poverty and prejudice?  Where do they come in, these dispossessed dark sons of the Father?  Surely, the Father has a very great deal to make up to them!—­Then the firelighted cabin walls, the wavering figure of the kneeling old man, the soft sound of light rain on the roof, faded and went out.  Peter fell asleep.

He slept a tired boy’s dreamless slumber.  The night deepened.  The rain ceased, and a wan and sad moon climbed the sky, wearily, like a tired old woman.  In the River Swamp frogs croaked, a whippoorwill at intervals gave its lonesome and lovely call, the shivering-owl’s cry making it lovelier by comparison.  The cypresses shook blackly in the blacker swamp water which licked their roots.  From the drenched vegetation arose a fresh and penetrating odor, the smell of the clean June night.  And presently, he didn’t know why, Peter awoke with every sense instantly alert.  It was as if his soul had sensed a sound, knew it for what it was, and was on guard.

A few red embers glowed in the big mud chimney.  Save for these, the one-room cabin was in darkness.  Somebody was moving about.  Peter made out the figure of big Neptune standing with his head bent in a listening attitude at one of the shuttered windows.  A bit of fatwood in the fireplace burst for a moment into an expiring flame, which flickered dully on the barrel of the gun in the negro’s hands.  Peter scrambled up, and stole noiselessly across the floor.

“Dem guineas potracked en waked me up, Son,” whispered Neptune.  “Now I aims to git whut ‘s been sneakin’ off wid my fowls.”

At that moment a low knock sounded on the door.  At such an hour, and in that lonely place, it gave the old man and the boy a distinct sensation of fear:  who should come knocking so stealthily at the door of the cabin by the River Swamp at that eerie hour?  Neptune, his gun gripped in his hands, twisted his head sidewise, listening.  The knock came again, this time more insistent.  Then a thick voice spoke, muffled by the intervening door: 

“Daddy Nepshun, is you awake?  For Gawd A’mighty’s sake, Daddy Nepshun, lemme in!”