Page:Birthright.djvu/295

 Peter did not pursue the topic of the weather. He climbed the hill in silence, wondering just what the buffoon meant. He suspected he was hinting at Cissie's visit to his room. However, he did not dare ask any questions or press the point in any manner, lest he commit himself.

The minstrel had succeeded in making Peter's walk very uncomfortable, as somehow he always did. Peter went on thinking about the matter. If Jim Pink knew of Cissie's visit, all Niggertown knew it. No woman's reputation, nobody's shame or misery or even life, would stand between Jim Pink and what he considered a joke. The buffoon was the crudest thing in this world—a man who thought himself a wit.

Peter could imagine all the endless tweaks to Cissie's pride Niggertown would give the octoroon. She had asked Peter to marry her and had been refused. She had humbled herself for naught. That was the very tar of shame. Peter knew that in the moral categories of Niggertown Cissie would suffer more from such a rebuff than if she had lied or committed theft and adultery every day in the calendar. She had been refused marriage. All the folk-ways of Niggertown were utterly topsyturvy. It was a crazy-house filled with the most grotesque moral measures.

It seemed to Peter as he entered the cedar-glade that he had lost all sympathy with this people from which he had sprung. He looked upon them as strange, incomprehensible beings, just as a man will