Mr. Bobbs sat listening impassively, moving his toothpick up and down from one side to the other of his small, thin-lipped mouth. At last he nodded.
“Well, I guess that's about the way of it. I didn't exactly understand the women's clothes business,—damn' fool disguise,—but we figgered it might pop into the head of a' edjucated nigger.” He sucked his teeth, reflectively. “Peter,” he said at last, “seems to me, if I was you, I'd drift on away from this town. The niggers around here ain't strong for you now; some say you're a hoodoo; some say this an' some that. The white folks don't exactly like you trying to get up a cook's union. It's your right to do that if you want to, of course, but this is a mighty small city to have unions and things. The fact is, it ain't a big enough place for a nigger of yore ability, Peter. I b'lieve, if I was you, I'd jes drift on some'eres else.”
The officer tipped up his toothpick so that it lifted his upper lip in a little v-shaped opening and exposed a strong, yellowish tooth. At the moment his machine started slowly forward. It gave him the appearance of accidentally rolling off while immersed in deep thought.
The death of Tump Pack moved Peter with a sense of strange pathos. He always remembered Tump tramping away through the night to carry Cissie some underclothes and, if possible, to take her place in jail. At the foundation of Tump's being lay a faithfulness and devotion to Cissie that reached the heights of a
