the mean semicircular street, where piccaninnies were kicking up clouds
of dust. He hurried through the dusty area, and presently turned off a
by-path that led over the hill, through a glade of cedars, to the white
village.

The glade was gloomy, but warm, for the shade of cedars somehow seems to
hold heat. A carpet of needles hushed Siner's footfalls and spread a
Sabbatical silence through the grove. The upward path was not smooth,
but was broken with outcrops of the same reddish limestone that marks
the whole stretch of the Tennessee River. Here and there in the grove
were circles eight or ten feet in diameter, brushed perfectly clean of
all needles and pebbles and twigs. These places were crap-shooters'
circles, where black and white men squatted to shoot dice.

Under the big stones on the hillside, Peter knew, was cached illicit
whisky, and at night the boot-leggers carried on a brisk trade among the
gamblers. More than that, the glade on the Big Hill was used for still
more demoralizing ends. It became a squalid grove of Ashtoreth; but now,
in the autumn evening, all the petty obscenities of white and black
sloughed away amid the religious implications of the dark-green aisles.

The sight of a white boy sitting on an outcrop of limestone with a strap
of school-books dropped at his feet rather surprised Peter. The negro
looked at the hobbledehoy for several seconds before he recognized in
the lanky youth a little Arkwright boy whom he had known and played with
in his pre-college days. Now there was such an exaggerated wistfulness
in young Arkwright's attitude that Peter was amused.

"Hello, Sam," he called. "What you doing out here?"