his walls had lapsed into a common obscurity. As he rose
slowly, so as not to start his head hurting again, he heard three rapid
pistol shots in the cedar glade between Niggertown and the white
village. He knew this to be the time-honored signal of boot-leggers
announcing that illicit whisky was for sale in the blackness of the
glade.

CHAPTER IV

Next day the Siner-Pack fight was the focus of news interest in Hooker's
Bend. White mistresses extracted the story from their black maids, and
were amused by it or deprecated Cissie Dildine's morals as the mood
moved them.

Along Main Street in front of the village stores, the merchants and
hangers-on discussed the affair. It was diverting that a graduate of
Harvard should come back to Hooker's Bend and immediately drop into such
a fracas. Old Captain Renfrew, one-time attorney at law and
representative of his county in the state legislature, sat under the
mulberry in front of the livery-stable and plunged into a long
monologue, with old Mr. Tomwit as listener, on the uneducability of the
black race.

"Take a horse, sir," expounded the captain; "a horse can be trained to
add and put its name together out of an alphabet, but no horse could
ever write a promissory note and figure the interest on it, sir. Take a
dog. I've known dogs, sir, that could bring your mail from the post-
office, but I never saw a dog stop on the way home, sir, to read a post-
card."

Here the old ex-attorney spat and renewed the tobacco in a black brier,
then proceeded to draw the parrallel between dogs and horses and Peter
Siner newly returned from Harvard.

"God'lmighty has set his limit on dogs, horses, and niggers, Mr. Tomwit.
Thus far and no farther. Take a nigger baby at birth; a nigger baby has
no fontanelles. It has no window toward heaven. Its skull is sealed up
in darkness. The nigger brain can never expand and absorb the universe,
sir. It can never rise on the wings of genius and weigh the stars, nor
compute the swing of the Pleiades. Thus far and no farther! It's
congenital.

"Now, take this Peter Siner and his disgraceful fight over a nigger
wench. Would you expect an educated stud horse to pay no attention to a
mare, sir? You can educate a stud till--"

"But hold on!" interrupted the old cavalryman. "I've known as
gentlemanly stallions as--as anybody!"

The old attorney cleared his throat, momentarily taken aback at this
failure of his m