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Half a dozen other negroes caught the joyful ​hysteria. They began a religious shouting, clapping their hands, flinging up their arms, shrieking.

One of the drummers grunted:

“Good God! all this over a nigger getting back!”

At the extreme end of the dark line a tall cream-colored girl wept silently. As Peter Siner stood blinking his eyes, he saw the octoroon's shoulders and breasts shake from the sobs, which her white blood repressed to silence.

A certain sympathy for her grief and its suppression kept Peter's eyes on the young woman, and then, with the queer effect of one picture melting into another, the strange girl's face assumed familiar curves and softnesses, and he was looking at Ida May.

A quiver traveled deliberately over Peter from his crisp black hair to the soles of his feet. He started toward her impulsively.

At that moment one of the drummers picked up his grip, and started down the gang-plank, and with its leathern bulk pressed Tump Pack and his mother out of his path. He moved on to the shore through the negroes, who divided at his approach. The captain of the launch saw that other of his white passengers were becoming impatient, and he shouted for the darkies to move aside and not to block the gangway. The youngish man drew the girl in the tailor suit close to him and started through with her. Peter heard him say, “They won't hurt you, Miss Negley.” And Miss Negley, in the brisk nasal intonation of a Northern ​woman, replied: “Oh, I'm not afraid. We waste a lot of sympathy on them back home, but when you see them—”