The Peter the Hermit of the order was Feathering, but the whimsy in the titles and name were from Randy and that advocate of Modern Art in Advertising, Mr. Harold W. Whittick, whose merry notion it had been to invent a Portuguese island called Sant Tabac, where tobacco had been discovered and all colored peoples had been banned.

Many of the crusaders were wearing a button depicting a pipe-smoking monk, but their achievements were less playful than their ritual, for the members were solid men of affairs, and if the local peerage, as incorporated in the Federal Club, were above joining, they did contribute. The leaders were trusty, swift and secretive men, given to strategy. And everything they did was known to the Negro world before it was known to the members. Randy Spruce’s office, where the plans were made, was in the Blue Ox Bank Building, and Cloat Windeck, the father of Phil, was head elevator man at that building and in charge of all waste paper.

Evan Brewster suggested to Randy Spruce that the members would save money if Negroes were accepted as workers instead of being expensively jailed or hospitalized, but Randy had no time to waste in listening to a blatherskite preacher.

The Sant Tabac, however earnest, cannot be credited with all the discharges of Negroes in Grand Republic. The return of the white soldiers, the strikes, the conversion of factories from tanks to suspender buckles, and the general conviction, richly cultivated by the radio and the comic strip, that all Negroes are amusing but bungling fools, were greater elements, but all of them worked sweetly together to start the epidemic of firing Negro workers, which began on All Fools Day.

It began at Wargate’s, with the letting out of two hundred brown-skin workers.

The management explained to them that they were being sent back to the breadlines solely because, with war manufacture ended, Wargate’s had to close several departments entirely.

Some of these departments were opened again in a couple of weeks, with new designations and with all-white workers.

The Five Points was certain that, by the end of the year, all of the Negroes working for Wargate’s would be dismissed. The discharged men stood about on corners, not parading, homeless, scared, swapping information about mythical towns in which, “fellow told me they’re hiring spooks now.”

One of the six hundred Negroes working for Wargate’s was a chemist named Ash Davis.

* * * * *

Ash said cheerfully to Martha and Neil, “If I get fired, I can probably get twenty a week fronting for some hair-straightener.”

The naive Neil marveled, “Wargate’s can’t let you go. Why, they’ll make hundreds of thousands of dollars out of your discoveries.”

“They will, but they don’t know it. They think I’m just fooling around at pure research. The South made tens of millions out of Carver’s discoveries about the lowly peanut, but they still made him use the back door. You whites are idealists. You put principle above mere money-grubbing—the principle of hate of the unknown. However. Wargate’s might keep me on as a floor-sweeper. I’m a neat sweeper.”