ers, where he and other
roustabouts were bedded, in bunk-houses in the woods. It also recalled a
certain octoroon girl named Ida May, and an intimacy with her which it
still moved and saddened Peter to think of. Indeed, it resurrected
innumerable vignettes of his life in the negro village in Hooker's Bend;
it was linked with innumerable emotions, this pungent, unforgetable odor
that filled the Jim Crow car.

Somehow the odor had a queer effect of appearing to push his
conversation with the two white Northern men in the drawing-room back to
a distance, an indefinable distance of both space and time.

The negro put his suitcase under the seat, hung his overcoat on the
hook, and placed his hand-bag in the rack overhead; then with some
difficulty he opened a window and sat down by it.

A stir of travelers in the Cairo station drifted into the car. Against a
broad murmur of hurrying feet, moving trucks, and talking there stood
out the thin, flat voice of a Southern white girl calling good-by to
some one on the train. Peter could see her waving a bright parasol and
tiptoeing. A sandwich boy hurried past, shrilling his wares. Siner
leaned out, with fifteen cents, and signaled to him. The urchin
hesitated, and was about to reach up one of his wrapped parcels, when a
peremptory voice shouted at him from a lower car. With a sort of start
the lad deserted Siner and went trotting down to his white customer. A
moment later the train bell began ringing, and the Dixie Flier puffed
deliberately out of the Cairo station and moved across the Ohio bridge
into the South.

Half an hour later the blue-grass fields of Kentucky were spinning
outside of the window in a vast green whirlpool. The distant trees and
houses moved forward with the train, while the foreground, with its
telegraph poles, its culverts, section-houses, and shrubbery, rushed
backward in a blur. Now and then into the Jim Crow window whipped a
blast of coal smoke and hot cinders, for the engine was only two cars
ahead.

Peter Siner looked out at the interminable spin of the landscape with a
certain wistfulness. He was coming back into the South, into his own
country. Here for generations his forebears had toiled endlessly and
fruitlessly, yet the fat green fields hurtling past him told with what
skill and patience their black hands had labored.

The negro shrugged away such thoughts, and with a certain effort
replaced them with the constructive idea that was bringing