he sont me acrost. I had to git a new pair breeches ever' three weeks, I growed so fas'.” Here he broke out into his big loose laugh again, and renewed the alcoholic scent around Peter.
“And you made good?”
“Sho did, black man, an', 'fo' Gawd, I 'serve a medal ef any man ever did. Dey gimme dish-heah fuh stobbin fo' white men wid a baynit. 'Fo' Gawd, nigger, I never felt so quare in all my born days as when I wuz a-jobbin' de livers o' dem white men lak de sahgeant tol' me to.” Tump shook his head, bewildered, and after a moment added, “Yas-suh, I never wuz mo' surprised in all my life dan when I got dis medal fuh stobbin' fo' white men.”
Peter Siner looked through the Jim Crow window at the vast rotation of the Kentucky landscape on which his forebears had toiled; presently he added soberly:
“You were fighting for your country, Tump. It was war then; you were fighting for your country.”
At Jackson, Tennessee, the two negroes were forced to spend the night between trains. Tump Pack piloted Peter Siner to a negro café where they could eat, and later they searched out a negro lodging-house on Gate Street where they could sleep. It was a grimy, smelly place, with its own odor spiked by a phosphate-reducing plant two blocks distant. The paper on the wall of the room Peter slept in looked scrofulous. There was no window, and Peter's four-years régime of
