When the engines stopped at one of the landings, Peter discovered she
was trying to pay him what he had spent on getting her baggage trucked
down at Perryville. The girl kept pressing a bill into the man's hand,
and he avoided receiving the money. They kept up the play for sake of
occasional contacts.

When the launch came in sight of Hooker's Bend toward the middle of the
afternoon, Peter Siner experienced one of the profoundest surprises of
his life. Somehow, all through his college days he had remembered
Hooker's Bend as a proud town with important stores and unapproachable
white residences. Now he saw a skum of negro cabins, high piles of
lumber, a sawmill, and an ice-factory. Behind that, on a little rise,
stood the old Brownell manor, maintaining a certain shabby dignity in a
grove of oaks. Behind and westward from the negro shacks and lumber-
piles ranged the village stores, their roofs just visible over the top
of the bank. Moored to the shore, lay the wharf-boat in weathered greens
and yellows. As a background for the whole scene rose the dark-green
height of what was called the "Big Hill," an eminence that separated the
negro village on the east from the white village on the west. The hill
itself held no houses, but appeared a solid green-black with cedars.

The ensemble was merely another lonely spot on the south bank of the
great somnolent river. It looked dead, deserted, a typical river town,
unprodded even by the hoot of a jerk-water railroad.

As the launch chortled toward the wharf, Peter Siner stood trying to
orient himself to this unexpected and amazing minifying of Hooker's
Bend. He had left a metropolis; he was coming back to a tumble-down
village. Yet nothing was changed. Even the two scraggly locust-trees
that clung perilously to the brink of the river bank still held their