"Cissie?" repeated Peter. Then he remembered a smaller sister of Ida May's, a little, squalling, yellow, wet-nosed nuisance that had annoyed his adolescence. So that little spoil-sport had grown up into the girl he had mistaken for Ida May. This fact increased his sense of strangeness--that sense of great change that had fallen on the village in his absence which formed the groundwork of all his renewed associations. Peter's prolonged silence aroused certain suspicions in the old negress. She glanced at her son out of the tail of her eyes. "Cissie Dildine is Tump Pack's gal," she stated defensively, with the jealousy all mothers feel toward all sons. A diversion in the shouts of the children up the mean street and a sudden furious barking of dogs drew Peter from the discussion. He looked up, and saw a negro girl of about fourteen coming down the curved street, with long, quick steps and an occasional glance over her shoulder. From across the thoroughfare a small chocolate-colored woman, with her wool done in outstanding spikes, thrust her head out at the door and called: "Whut's de matter, Ofeely?" The girl lifted a high voice: "Oh, Miss Nan, it's that constable goin' th'ugh the houses!" The girl veered across the street to the safety of the open door and one of her own sex. "Good Lawd!" cried the spiked one in disgust, "ever', time a white pusson gits somp'n misplaced--" She moved to one side to allow the girl to enter, and continued staring up the street, with the whites of her eyes accented against her dark face, after the way of angry negroes. Around the crescent the dogs were furious. They were Niggertown dogs, and the sight of a white man always drove them to a frenzy. Presently in the hullabaloo, Peter heard Dawson Bobbs's voice shouting: "Aunt Mahaly, if you kain't call off this dawg, I'm shore goin' to kill him." Then an old woman's scolding broke in and complicated the mêlée. Presently Peter saw the bulky form of Dawson Bobbs come around the curve, moving methodically from cabin to cabin. He held some legal- looking papers in his hands, and Peter knew what the constable was doing. He was serving a blanket search-warrant on the whole black population of Hooker's Bend. At almost every cabin a dog ran out to blaspheme at the intruder, but a wave of the man's pistol sent them yelping under the floors again. When the constable entered a house, Peter could hear him bumping and rattling among the furnishings, while the black householders stood outside the door and watched him disturb their housekeeping arrangements. Presently Bobbs came angling across the street toward the Siner cabin. As he entered the rickety gate, old Caroline called out: "Whut is you after, anyway, white man?" Bobbs turned cold, truculent eyes on the old negress. "A turkey roaster," he snapped. "Some o' you niggers stole Miss Lou Arkwright's turkey roaster."