the dust-cloud, wabbly, with roaring head. His open mouth
was full of dust. Then he became aware that negroes were running in from
every direction, shouting. Their voices whooped out what had happened,
who it was, who had licked. Tump Pack's agonized spasms brought howls of
mirth from the black fellows. Negro women were in the crowd, grinning, a
little frightened, but curious. Some were in Mother-Hubbards; one had
her hair half combed, one side in a kinky mattress, the other lying flat
and greased down to her scalp.

When Peter gradually became able to breathe and could think at all,
there was something terrible to him in Tump's silent attack and in this
extravagant black mirth over mere suffering. Cissie was gone,--had fled,
no doubt, at the beginning of the fight.

The prostrate man's tortured abdomen finally allowed him to twist around
toward Peter. His eyes were popped, and seemed all yellows and streaked
with swollen veins.

"I'll git you fuh dis," he wheezed, spitting dust "You did n' fight
fair, you--"

The black chorus rolled their heads and pounded one another in a gale of
merriment.

Peter Siner turned away toward his home filled with sick thought. He had
never realized so clearly the open sore of Niggertown life and its great
need of healing, yet this very episode would further bar him, Peter,
from any constructive work. He foresaw, too plainly, how the white town
and Niggertown would react to this fight. There would be no
discrimination in the scandal. He, Peter Siner, would be grouped with
the boot-leggers and crap-shooters and women-chasers who filled
Niggertown with their brawls. As a matter of simple fact, he had been
fighting with another negro over a woman. That he was subjected to an
attack without warning or cause would never become a factor in the
analysis. He knew that very well.

Two of Peter's teeth were loose; his left jaw was swelling; his head
throbbed. With that queer perversity of human nerves, he kept biting his
sore teeth together as he walked along.

When he reached home, his mother met him at the door. Thanks to the
swiftness with which gossip spreads among black folk, she had already
heard of the fight, and incidentally had formed her judgment of the
matter. Now she looked in exasperation at her son's swelling face.

"I 'cla' 'fo' Gawd!--ain't been home a week befo' he's fightin' over a
nigger wench lak a roustabout!"

Peter's head throbbed so he could hardly make out the de