The old hill woman was dozing in her
chair, her bonnet bobbing to each stroke of the engines. The youngish
man and the girl were engaged in some sort of intimate lovers' dispute.
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.
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