Saint Marks,
a college and seminary graduate. And he had come just in time. Brother
Officer was getting old, but the determining factor which made the
change necessary was that Delafield happened to be near one of the
general routes by which thousands of colored people were moving
northward. "Exoduses" have been before; Kansas still remembers the
exodus from Tennessee of forty years ago; but this latest exodus had no
one starting-point nor any single destination. It was a vast shifting of
Negro populations from below Mason and Dixon's line, and it swept
northward toward all the great industrial centers. Its cause and
consequences make a remarkable story, for which there is no room in this
chronicle.

Delafield thought it could not absorb many more Negroes, but before the
exodus movement subsided the stragglers who had turned aside at
Delafield had more than doubled the Negro population of the town.

A heavy burden of new responsibility was on the young pastor of Saint
Marks. The newcomers had no such alertness and resourcefulness as his
own people. They were helpless in the face of new experiences. Soon
they became a worry and an enigma to the town authorities; but
especially and inevitably they turned to the churches of their own
color, of which Delafield could boast but two, a Methodist and a
Baptist. So Saint Marks and its pastor found both new opportunity and
new troubles.

One day in the early spring Mr. Drury dropped in to the Farwell store
and asked J.W. if he would be busy that night. The road to Deep Creek
was at its spring worst, and J.W. had nothing special on. He said as
much, and answering his look of inquiry the pastor said, "There's a man
speaking at Saint Marks to-night who's a Yale graduate and a Negro. He's
also a Methodist. Does the combination interest you?"

"Why, yes," J.W. answered, "it might. You know I used to go with the
bunch to Saint Marks when Brother Officer was pastor, but I haven't been
since he left. I'd like to see what the new preacher is doing, and it
ought to be worth something to hear a Negro alumnus of Yale."

William Hightower, it seemed, was the speaker's name--a strong-voiced;
confident man in his thirties. As J.W., soon discovered, Hightower was a
distinctively modern Negro. Where King Officer had been almost cringing,
Hightower's thought, however diplomatically spoken, was that of an
up-standing mind; where Officer accepted as part of the social order the
colored man's