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 doings of Tump Pack and Cissie Dildine were, after all, nothing to him.

He started inside, when the levy notice on the door again met his eyes. He paused, read it over once more, and decided that he must go over the hill to the Planter's Bank and get Henry Hooker's permission to remove certain small personal belongings that he wanted to take with him.

The mere clear-cut decision to go invigorated Peter.

Some of the energy that always filled him during his college days in Boston seemed to come to him now from the mere thought of the North. Soon he would be in the midst of it, moving briskly, talking to wide-awake men to whom a slightly unusual English word would not form a stumbling-block to conversation. He set out down the crescent and across the Big Hill at a swinging stride. He was glad to get away.

Beyond the white church on the other side of the hill he heard a motor coming in on the Jonesboro road. Presently he saw a battered car moving around the long swing of the pike, spewing a trail of dust down the wind. Its clacking became prodigious.

The mulatto was just entering that indefinite stretch of thoroughfare where a country road becomes a village street when there came a wail of brakes behind him and he looked around.

It was Dawson Bobbs's car. The fat man now slowed up not far from the mulatto and called to him.