The President had pursued with persistence the plan of Lincoln for the immediate restoration of the Union. Would Congress follow the lead of the President or challenge him to mortal combat?

Civil governments had been restored in all the Southern States, with men of the highest ability chosen as governors and lawmakers. Their legislatures had unanimously voted for the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution abolishing slavery, and elected senators and representatives to Congress. Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State, had declared the new amendment a part of the organic law of the Nation by the vote of these States.

General Grant went to the South to report its condition and boldly declared:

"I am satisfied that the mass of thinking people of the South accept the situation in good faith. Slavery and secession they regard as settled forever by the highest known tribunal, and consider this decision a fortunate one for the whole country."

Would the Southerners be allowed to enter?

Amid breathless silence the clerk rose to call the roll of members-elect. Every ear was bent to hear the name of the first Southern man. Not one was called! The Master had spoken. His clerk knew how to play his part.

The next business of the House was to receive the message of the Chief Magistrate of the Nation.

The message came, but not from the White House. It came from the seat of the Great Commoner.

As the first thrill of excitement over the challenge to the President slowly subsided, Stoneman rose, planted his big club foot in the middle of the aisle, and delivered to Congress the word of its new master.

It was Ben's first view of the man of all the world just now of most interest. From his position he could see his full face and figure.

He began speaking in a careless, desultory way. His tone was loud yet not declamatory, at first in a grumbling, grandfatherly, half-humorous, querulous accent that riveted every ear instantly. A sort of drollery of a contagious kind haunted it. Here and there a member tittered in expectation of a flash of wit.

His figure was taller than the average, slightly bent, with a dignity which suggested reserve power and contempt for his audience. One knew instinctively that back of the boldest word this man might say there was a bolder unspoken word he had chosen not to speak.

His limbs were long, and their movements slow, yet nervous as from some internal fiery force. His hands were big and ugly, and always in ungraceful fumbling motion as though a separate soul dwelt within them.

The heaped-up curly profusion of his brown wig gave a weird impression to the spread of his mobile features. His eagle-beaked nose had three distinct lines and angles. His chin was broad and bold, and his brows beetling and projecting. His mouth was wide, marked, and grim; when opened, deep and cavernous; when closed, it seemed to snap so tightly that the lower lip protruded.

Of all his make-up, his eye was the most fascinating, and it held Ben spellbound. It could thrill to the deepest fibre of the soul that looked into it, yet it did not gleam. It could dominate, awe, and confound, yet it seemed to have no colour or fire. He could easily see it across the vast hall from the galleries, yet it was not large. Two bold, colourless dagger-points of light they seemed. As he grew excited, they darkened as if passing under a cloud.

A sudden sweep of his huge apelike arm in an angular gesture, and the drollery and carelessness of his voice were riven from it as by a bolt of lightning.

He was driving home his message now in brutal frankness. Yet in the height of his fiercest invective he never seemed to strengthen himself or call on his resources. In its climax he was careless, conscious of power, and contemptuous of results, as though as a gambler he had staked and lost all and in the moment of losing suddenly become the master of those who had beaten him.

His speech never once bent to persuade or convince. He meant to brain the opposition with a single blow, and he did it. For he suddenly took the breath from his foes by shouting in their faces the hidden motive of which they were hoping to accuse him!

"Admit these Southern Representatives," he cried, "and with the Democrats elected from the North, within one term they will have a majority in Congress and the Electoral College. The supremacy of our party's life is at stake. The man who dares palter with such a measure is a rebel, a traitor to his party and his people."

A cheer burst from his henchmen, and his foes sat in dazed stupor at his audacity. He moved the appointment of a "Committee on Reconstruction" to whom the entire government of the "conquered provinces of the South" should be committed, and to whom all credentials of their pretended representatives should be referred.

He sat down as the Speaker put his motion, declared it carried, and quickly announced the names of this Imperial Committee with the Hon. Austin Stoneman as its chairman.

He then permitted the message of the President of the United States to be read by his clerk.

"Well, upon my soul," said Ben, taking a deep breath and looking at Elsie, "he's the whole thing, isn't he?"

The girl smiled with pride.

"Yes; he is a genius. He was born to command and yet never could resist the cry of a child or the plea of a woman. He hates, but he hates ideas and systems. He makes threats, yet when he meets the man who stands for all he hates he falls in love with his enemy."

"Then there's hope for me?"

"Yes, but I must be the judge of the time to speak."

"Well, if he looks at me as he did once to-day, you may have to do the speaking also."

"You will like him when you know him. He is one of the greatest men in America."

"At least he's the father of the greatest girl in the world, which is far more important."

"I wonder if you know how important?" she asked seriously. "He is the apple of my eye. His bitter words, his cynicism and sarcasm, are all on the surface—masks that hide a great sensitive spirit. You can't know with what brooding tenderness I have always loved and worshipped him. I will never marry against his wishes."

"I hope he and I will always be good friends," said Ben doubtfully.

"You must," she replied, eagerly pressing his hand.



CHAPTER VII

A WOMAN LAUGHS

Each day the conflict waxed warmer between the President and the Commoner.

The first bill sent to the White House to Africanize the "conquered provinces" the President vetoed in a message of such logic, dignity, and power, the old leader found to his amazement it was impossible to rally the two-thirds majority to pass it over his head.

At first, all had gone as planned. Lynch and Howle brought to him a report on "Southern Atrocities," secured through the councils of the secret oath-bound Union League, which had destroyed the impression of General Grant's words and prepared his followers for blind submission to his Committee.

Yet the rally of a group of men in defence of the Constitution had given the President unexpected strength.

Stoneman saw that he must hold his hand on the throat of the South and fight another campaign. Howle and Lynch furnished the publication committee of the Union League the matter, and they printed four million five hundred thousand pamphlets on "Southern Atrocities."

The Northern States were hostile to negro suffrage, the first step of his revolutionary programme, and not a dozen men in Congress had yet dared to favour it. Ohio, Michigan, New York, and Kansas had rejected it by overwhelming majorities. But he could appeal to their passions and prejudices against the "Barbarism" of the South. It would work like magic. When he had the South where he wanted it, he would turn and ram negro suffrage and negro equality down the throats of the reluctant North.

His energies were now bent to prevent any effective legislation in Congress until his strength should be omnipotent.

A cloud disturbed the sky for a moment in the Senate. John Sherman, of Ohio, began to loom on the horizon as a constructive statesman, and without consulting him was quietly forcing over Sumner's classic oratory a Reconstruction Bill restoring the Southern States to the Union on the basis of Lincoln's plan, with no provision for interference with the suffrage. It had gone to its last reading, and the final vote was pending.

The house was in session at 3 a. m., waiting in feverish anxiety the outcome of this struggle in the Senate.

Old Stoneman was in his seat, fast asleep from the exhaustion of an unbroken session of forty hours. His meals he had sent to his desk from the Capitol restaurant. He was seventy-four years old and not in good health, yet his energy was tireless, his resources inexhaustible, and his audacity matchless.

Sunset Cox, the wag of the House, an opponent but personal friend of the old Commoner, passing his seat and seeing the great head sunk on his breast in sleep, laughed softly and said:

"Mr. Speaker!"

The presiding officer recognized the young Democrat with a nod of answering humour and responded:

"The gentleman from New York."

"I move you, sir," said Cox, "that, in view of the advanced age and eminent services of the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania, the Sergeant-at-Arms be instructed to furnish him with enough poker chips to last till morning!"

The scattered members who were awake roared with laughter, the Speaker pounded furiously with his gavel, the sleepy little pages jumped up, rubbing their eyes, and ran here and there answering imaginary calls, and the whole House waked to its usual noise and confusion.

The old man raised his massive head and looked to the door leading toward the Senate just as Sumner rushed through. He had slept for a moment, but his keen intellect had taken up the fight at precisely the point at which he left it.

Sumner approached his desk rapidly, leaned over, and reported his defeat and Sherman's triumph.

"For God's sake throttle this measure in the House or we are ruined!" he exclaimed.

"Don't be alarmed," replied the cynic. "I'll be here with stronger weapons than articulated wind."

"You have not a moment to lose. The bill is on its way to the Speaker's desk, and Sherman's men are going to force its passage to-night."

The Senator returned to the other end of the Capitol wrapped in the mantle of his outraged dignity, and in thirty minutes the bill was defeated, and the House adjourned.

As the old Commoner hobbled through the door, his crooked cane thumping the marble floor, Sumner seized and pressed his hand:

"How did you do it?"

Stoneman's huge jaws snapped together and his lower lip protruded:

"I sent for Cox and summoned the leader of the Democrats. I told them if they would join with me and defeat this bill, I'd give them a better one the next session. And I will—negro suffrage! The gudgeons swallowed it whole!"

Sumner lifted his eyebrows and wrapped his cloak a little closer.

The Great Commoner laughed as he departed:

"He is yet too good for this world, but he'll forget it before we're done this fight."

On the steps a beggar asked him for a night's lodging, and he tossed him a gold eagle.

* * * * *

The North, which had rejected negro suffrage for itself with scorn, answered Stoneman's fierce appeal to their passions against the South, and sent him a delegation of radicals eager to do his will.

So fierce had waxed the combat between the President and Congress that the very existence of Stanton's prisoners languishing in jail was forgotten, and the Secretary of War himself became a football to be kicked back and forth in this conflict of giants. The fact that Andrew Johnson was from Tennessee, and had been an old-line Democrat before his election as a Unionist with Lincoln, was now a fatal weakness in his position. Under Stoneman's assaults he became at once an executive without a party, and every word of amnesty and pardon he proclaimed for the South in accordance with Lincoln's plan was denounced as the act of a renegade courting favour of traitors and rebels.

Stanton remained in his cabinet against his wishes to insult and defy him, and Stoneman, quick to see the way by which the President of the Nation could be degraded and made ridiculous, introduced a bill depriving him of the power to remove his own cabinet officers. The act was not only meant to degrade the President; it was a trap set for his ruin. The penalties were so fixed that its violation would give specific ground for his trial, impeachment, and removal from office.

Again Stoneman passed his first act to reduce the "conquered provinces" of the South to negro rule.

President Johnson vetoed it with a message of such logic in defence of the constitutional rights of the States that it failed by one vote to find the two-thirds majority needed to become a law without his approval.

The old Commoner's eyes froze into two dagger-points of icy light when this vote was announced.

With fury he cursed the President, but above all he cursed the men of his own party who had faltered.

As he fumbled his big hands nervously, he growled:

"If I only had five men of genuine courage in Congress, I'd hang the man at the other end of the avenue from the porch of the White House! But I haven't got them—cowards, dastards, dolts, and snivelling fools——"

His decision was instantly made. He would expel enough Democrats from the Senate and the House to place his two-thirds majority beyond question. The name of the President never passed his lips. He referred to him always, even in public debate, as "the man at the other end of the avenue," or "the former Governor of Tennessee who once threatened rebels—the late lamented Andrew Johnson, of blessed memory."

He ordered the expulsion of the new member of the House from Indiana, Daniel W. Voorhees, and the new Senator from New Jersey, John P. Stockton. This would give him a majority of two thirds composed of men who would obey his word without a question.

Voorhees heard of the edict with indignant wrath. He had met Stoneman in the lobbies, where he was often the centre of admiring groups of friends. His wit and audacity, and, above all, his brutal frankness, had won the admiration of the "Tall Sycamore of the Wabash." He could not believe such a man would be a party to a palpable fraud. He appealed to him personally:

"Look here, Stoneman," the young orator cried with wrath, "I appeal to your sense of honour and decency. My credentials have been accepted by your own committee, and my seat been awarded me. My majority is unquestioned. This is a high-handed outrage. You cannot permit this crime."

The old man thrust his deformed foot out before him, struck it meditatively with his cane, and looking Voorhees straight in the eye, boldly said:

"There's nothing the matter with your majority, young man. I've no doubt it's all right. Unfortunately, you are a Democrat, and happen to be the odd man in the way of the two-thirds majority on which the supremacy of my party depends. You will have to go. Come back some other time." And he did.

In the Senate there was a hitch. When the vote was taken on the expulsion of Stockton, to the amazement of the leader it was a tie.

He hobbled into the Senate Chamber, with the steel point of his cane ringing on the marble flags as though he were thrusting it through the vitals of the weakling who had sneaked and hedged and trimmed at the crucial moment.

He met Howle at the door.

"What's the matter in there?" he asked.

"They're trying to compromise."

"Compromise—the Devil of American politics," he muttered. "But how did the vote fail—it was all fixed before the roll-call?"

"Roman, of Maine, has trouble with his conscience! He is paired not to vote on this question with Stockton's colleague, who is sick in Trenton. His 'honour' is involved, and he refuses to break his word."

"I see," said Stoneman, pulling his bristling brows down until his eyes were two beads of white gleaming through them. "Tell Wade to summon every member of the party in his room immediately and hold the Senate in session."

When the group of Senators crowded into the Vice-president's room the old man faced them leaning on his cane and delivered an address of five minutes they never forgot.

His speech had a nameless fascination. The man himself with his elemental passions was a wonder. He left on public record no speech worth reading, and yet these powerful men shrank under his glance. As the nostrils of his big three-angled nose dilated, the scream of an eagle rang in his voice, his huge ugly hand held the crook of his cane with the clutch of a tiger, his tongue flew with the hiss of an adder, and his big deformed foot seemed to grip the floor as the claw of a beast.

"The life of a political party, gentlemen," he growled in conclusion, "is maintained by a scheme of subterfuges in which the moral law cuts no figure. As your leader, I know but one law—success. The world is full of fools who must have toys with which to play. A belief in politics is the favourite delusion of shallow American minds. But you and I have no delusions. Your life depends on this vote. If any man thinks the abstraction called 'honour' is involved, let him choose between his honour and his life! I call no names. This issue must be settled now before the Senate adjourns. There can be no to-morrow. It is life or death. Let the roll be called again immediately."

The grave Senators resumed their seats, and Wade, the acting Vice-president, again put the question to Stockton's expulsion.

The member from New England sat pale and trembling, in his soul the anguish of the mortal combat between his Puritan conscience, the iron heritage of centuries, and the order of his captain.

When the Clerk of the Senate called his name, still the battle raged. He sat in silence, the whiteness of death about his lips, while the clerk at a signal from the Chair paused.

And then a scene the like of which was never known in American history! August Senators crowded around his desk, begging, shouting, imploring, and demanding that a fellow Senator break his solemn word of honour!

For a moment pandemonium reigned.

"Vote! Vote! Call his name again!" they shouted.

High above all rang the voice of Charles Sumner, leading the wild chorus, crying:

"Vote! Vote! Vote!"

The galleries hissed and cheered—the cheers at last drowning every hiss.

Stoneman pushed his way among the mob which surrounded the badgered Puritan as he attempted to retreat into the cloakroom.

"Will you vote?" he hissed, his eyes flashing poison.

"My conscience will not permit it," he faltered.

"To hell with your conscience!" the old leader thundered. "Go back to your seat, ask the clerk to call your name, and vote, or by the living God I'll read you out of the party to-night and brand you a snivelling coward, a copperhead, a renegade, and traitor!"

Trembling from head to foot, he staggered back to his seat, the cold sweat standing in beads on his forehead, and gasped:

"Call my name!"

The shrill voice of the clerk rang out in the stillness like the peal of a trumpet:

"Mr. Roman!"

And the deed was done.

A cheer burst from his colleagues, and the roll-call proceeded.

When Stockton's name was reached he sprang to his feet, voted for himself, and made a second tie!

With blank faces they turned to the leader, who ordered Charles Sumner to move that the Senator from New Jersey be not allowed to answer his name on an issue involving his own seat.

It was carried. Again the roll was called, and Stockton expelled by a majority of one.

In the moment of ominous silence which followed, a yellow woman of sleek animal beauty leaned far over the gallery rail and laughed aloud.

The passage of each act of the Revolutionary programme over the veto of the President was now but a matter of form. The act to degrade his office by forcing him to keep a cabinet officer who daily insulted him, the Civil Rights Bill, and the Freedman's Bureau Bill followed in rapid succession.

Stoneman's crowning Reconstruction Act was passed, two years after the war had closed, shattering the Union again into fragments, blotting the names of ten great Southern States from its roll, and dividing their territory into five Military Districts under the control of belted satraps.

When this measure was vetoed by the President, it came accompanied by a message whose words will be forever etched in fire on the darkest page of the Nation's life.

Amid hisses, curses, jeers, and cat-calls, the Clerk of the House read its burning words:

"The power thus given to the commanding officer over the people of each district is that of an absolute monarch. His mere will is to take the place of law. He may make a criminal code of his own; he can make it as bloody as any recorded in history, or he can reserve the privilege of acting on the impulse of his private passions in each case that arises.

"Here is a bill of attainer against nine millions of people at once. It is based upon an accusation so vague as to be scarcely intelligible, and found to be true upon no credible evidence. Not one of the nine millions was heard in his own defence. The representatives even of the doomed parties were excluded from all participation in the trial. The conviction is to be followed by the most ignominious punishment ever inflicted on large masses of men. It disfranchises them by hundreds of thousands and degrades them all—even those who are admitted to be guiltless—from the rank of freemen to the condition of slaves.

"Such power has not been wielded by any monarch in England for more than five hundred years, and in all that time no people who speak the English tongue have borne such servitude."

When the last jeering cat-call which greeted this message of the Chief Magistrate had died away on the floor and in the galleries, old Stoneman rose, with a smile playing about his grim mouth, and introduced his bill to impeach the President of the United States and remove him from office.



CHAPTER VIII

A DREAM

Elsie spent weeks of happiness in an abandonment of joy to the spell of her lover. His charm was resistless. His gift of delicate intimacy, the eloquence with which he expressed his love, and yet the manly dignity with which he did it, threw a spell no woman could resist.

Each day's working hours were given to his father's case and to the study of law. If there was work to do, he did it, and then struck the word care from his life, giving himself body and soul to his love. Great events were moving. The shock of the battle between Congress and the President began to shake the Republic to its foundations. He heard nothing, felt nothing, save the music of Elsie's voice.

And she knew it. She had only played with lovers before. She had never seen one of Ben's kind, and he took her by storm. His creed was simple. The chief end of life is to glorify the girl you love. Other things could wait. And he let them wait. He ignored their existence.

But one cloud cast its shadow over the girl's heart during these red-letter days of life—the fear of what her father would do to her lover's people. Ben had asked her whether he must speak to him. When she said "No, not yet," he forgot that such a man lived. As for his politics, he knew nothing and cared less.

But the girl knew and thought with sickening dread, until she forgot her fears in the joy of his laughter. Ben laughed so heartily, so insinuatingly, the contagion of his fun could not be resisted.

He would sit for hours and confess to her the secrets of his boyish dreams of glory in war, recount his thrilling adventures and daring deeds with such enthusiasm that his cause seemed her own, and the pity and the anguish of the ruin of his people hurt her with the keen sense of personal pain. His love for his native State was so genuine, his pride in the bravery and goodness of its people so chivalrous, she began to see for the first time how the cords which bound the Southerner to his soil were of the heart's red blood.

She began to understand why the war, which had seemed to her a wicked, cruel, and causeless rebellion, was the one inevitable thing in our growth from a loose group of sovereign States to a United Nation. Love had given her his point of view.

Secret grief over her father's course began to grow into conscious fear. With unerring instinct she felt the fatal day drawing nearer when these two men, now of her inmost life, must clash in mortal enmity.

She saw little of her father. He was absorbed with fevered activity and deadly hate in his struggle with the President.

Brooding over her fears one night, she had tried to interest Ben in politics. To her surprise she found that he knew nothing of her father's real position or power as leader of his party. The stunning tragedy of the war had for the time crushed out of his consciousness all political ideas, as it had for most young Southerners. He took her hand while a dreamy look overspread his swarthy face:

"Don't cross a bridge till you come to it. I learned that in the war. Politics are a mess. Let me tell you something that counts——"

He felt her hand's soft pressure and reverently kissed it. "Listen," he whispered. "I was dreaming last night after I left you of the home we'll build. Just back of our place, on the hill overlooking the river, my father and mother planted trees in exact duplicate of the ones they placed around our house when they were married. They set these trees in honour of the first-born of their love, that he should make his nest there when grown. But it was not for him. He had pitched his tent on higher ground, and the others with him. This place will be mine. There are forty varieties of trees, all grown—elm, maple, oak, holly, pine, cedar, magnolia, and every fruit and flowering stem that grows in our friendly soil. A little house, built near the vacant space reserved for the homestead, is nicely kept by a farmer, and birds have learned to build in every shrub and tree. All the year their music rings its chorus—one long overture awaiting the coming of my bride——"

Elsie sighed.

"Listen, dear," he went on eagerly. "Last night I dreamed the South had risen from her ruins. I saw you there. I saw our home standing amid a bower of roses your hands had planted. The full moon wrapped it in soft light, while you and I walked hand in hand in silence beneath our trees. But fairer and brighter than the moon was the face of her I loved, and sweeter than all the songs of birds the music of her voice!"

A tear dimmed the girl's warm eyes, and a deeper flush mantled her cheeks, as she lifted her face and whispered:

"Kiss me."



CHAPTER IX

THE KING AMUSES HIMSELF

With savage energy the Great Commoner pressed to trial the first impeachment of a President of the United States for high crimes and misdemeanours.

His bill to confiscate the property of the Southern people was already pending on the calendar of the House. This bill was the most remarkable ever written in the English language or introduced into a legislative body of the Aryan race. It provided for the confiscation of ninety per cent. of the land of ten great States of the American Union. To each negro in the South was allotted forty acres from the estate of his former master, and the remaining millions of acres were to be divided among the "loyal who had suffered by reason of the Rebellion."

The execution of this, the most stupendous crime ever conceived by an English lawmaker, involving the exile and ruin of millions of innocent men, women, and children, could not be intrusted to Andrew Johnson.

No such measure could be enforced so long as any man was President and Commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy who claimed his title under the Constitution. Hence the absolute necessity of his removal.

The conditions of society were ripe for this daring enterprise.

Not only was the Ship of State in the hands of revolutionists who had boarded her in the storm stress of a civic convulsion, but among them swarmed the pirate captains of the boldest criminals who ever figured in the story of a nation.

The first great Railroad Lobby, with continental empires at stake, thronged the Capitol with its lawyers, agents, barkers, and hired courtesans.

The Cotton Thieves, who operated through a ring of Treasury agents, had confiscated unlawfully three million bales of cotton hidden in the South during the war and at its close, the last resource of a ruined people. The Treasury had received a paltry twenty thousand bales for the use of its name with which to seize alleged "property of the Confederate Government." The value of this cotton, stolen from the widows and orphans, the maimed and crippled, of the South was over $700,000,000 in gold—a capital sufficient to have started an impoverished people again on the road to prosperity. The agents of this ring surrounded the halls of legislation, guarding their booty from envious eyes, and demanding the enactment of vaster schemes of legal confiscation.

The Whiskey Ring had just been formed, and began its system of gigantic frauds by which it scuttled the Treasury.

Above them all towered the figure of Oakes Ames, whose master mind had organized the Credit Mobilier steal. This vast infamy had already eaten its way into the heart of Congress and dug the graves of many illustrious men.

So open had become the shame that Stoneman was compelled to increase his committees in the morning, when a corrupt majority had been bought the night before.

He arose one day, and looking at the distinguished Speaker, who was himself the secret associate of Oakes Ames, said:

"Mr. Speaker: while the House slept, the enemy has sown tares among our wheat. The corporations of this country, having neither bodies to be kicked nor souls to be lost, have, perhaps by the power of argument alone, beguiled from the majority of my Committee the member from Connecticut. The enemy have now a majority of one. I move to increase the Committee to twelve."

Speaker Colfax, soon to be hurled from the Vice-president's chair for his part with those thieves, increased his Committee.

Everybody knew that "the power of argument alone" meant ten thousand dollars cash for the gentleman from Connecticut, who did not appear on the floor for a week, fearing the scorpion tongue of the old Commoner.

A Congress which found it could make and unmake laws in defiance of the Executive went mad. Taxation soared to undreamed heights, while the currency was depreciated and subject to the wildest fluctuations.

The statute books were loaded with laws that shackled chains of monopoly on generations yet unborn. Public lands wide as the reach of empires were voted as gifts to private corporations, and subsidies of untold millions fixed as a charge upon the people and their children's children.

The demoralization incident to a great war, the waste of unheard-of sums of money, the giving of contracts involving millions by which fortunes were made in a night, the riot of speculation and debauchery by those who tried to get rich suddenly without labour, had created a new Capital of the Nation. The vulture army of the base, venal, unpatriotic, and corrupt, which had swept down, a black cloud, in wartime to take advantage of the misfortunes of the Nation, had settled in Washington and gave new tone to its life.

Prior to the Civil War the Capital was ruled, and the standards of its social and political life fixed, by an aristocracy founded on brains, culture, and blood. Power was with few exceptions intrusted to an honourable body of high-spirited public officials. Now a negro electorate controlled the city government, and gangs of drunken negroes, its sovereign citizens, paraded the streets at night firing their muskets unchallenged and unmolested.

A new mob of onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odour, became the symbol of American Democracy.

A new order of society sprouted in this corruption. The old high-bred ways, tastes, and enthusiasms were driven into the hiding-places of a few families and cherished as relics of the past.

Washington, choked with scrofulous wealth, bowed the knee to the Almighty Dollar. The new altar was covered with a black mould of human blood—but no questions were asked.

A mulatto woman kept the house of the foremost man of the Nation and received his guests with condescension.

In this atmosphere of festering vice and gangrene passions, the struggle between the Great Commoner and the President on which hung the fate of the South approached its climax.

The whole Nation was swept into the whirlpool, and business was paralyzed. Two years after the close of a victorious war the credit of the Republic dropped until its six per cent. bonds sold in the open market for seventy-three cents on the dollar.

The revolutionary junta in control of the Capital was within a single step of the subversion of the Government and the establishment of a Dictator in the White House.

A convention was called in Philadelphia to restore fraternal feeling, heal the wounds of war, preserve the Constitution, and restore the Union of the fathers. It was a grand assemblage representing the heart and brain of the Nation. Members of Lincoln's first Cabinet, protesting Senators and Congressmen, editors of great Republican and Democratic newspapers, heroes of both armies, long estranged, met for a common purpose. When a group of famous negro worshippers from Boston suddenly entered the hall, arm in arm with ex-slaveholders from South Carolina, the great meeting rose and walls and roof rang with thunder peals of applause.

Their committee, headed by a famous editor, journeyed to Washington to appeal to the Master at the Capitol. They sought him not in the White House, but in the little Black House in an obscure street on the hill.

The brown woman received them with haughty dignity, and said:

"Mr. Stoneman cannot be seen at this hour. It is after nine o'clock. I will submit to him your request for an audience to-morrow morning."

"We must see him to-night," replied the editor, with rising anger.

"The king is amusing himself," said the yellow woman, with a touch of malice.

"Where is he?"

Her catlike eyes rolled from side to side, and a smile played about her full lips as she said:

"You will find him at Hall & Pemberton's gambling hell—you've lived in Washington. You know the way."

With a muttered oath the editor turned on his heel and led his two companions to the old Commoner's favourite haunt. There could be no better time or place to approach him than seated at one of its tables laden with rare wines and savoury dishes.

On reaching the well-known number of Hall & Pemberton's place, the editor entered the unlocked door, passed with his friends along the soft-carpeted hall, and ascended the stairs. Here the door was locked. A sudden pull of the bell, and a pair of bright eyes peeped through a small grating in the centre of the door revealed by the sliding of its panel.

The keen eyes glanced at the proffered card, the door flew open, and a well-dressed mulatto invited them with cordial welcome to enter.

Passing along another hall, they were ushered into a palatial suite of rooms furnished in princely state. The floors were covered with the richest and softest carpets—so soft and yielding that the tramp of a thousand feet could not make the faintest echo. The walls and ceilings were frescoed by the brush of a great master, and hung with works of art worth a king's ransom. Heavy curtains, in colours of exquisite taste, masked each window, excluding all sound from within or without.

The rooms blazed with light from gorgeous chandeliers of trembling crystals, shimmering and flashing from the ceilings like bouquets of diamonds.

Negro servants, faultlessly dressed, attended the slightest want of every guest with the quiet grace and courtesy of the lost splendours of the old South.

The proprietor, with courtly manners, extended his hand:

"Welcome, gentlemen; you are my guests. The tables and the wines are at your service without price. Eat, drink, and be merry—play or not, as you please."

A smile lighted his dark eyes, but faded out near his mouth—cold and rigid.

At the farther end of the last room hung the huge painting of a leopard, so vivid and real its black and tawny colours, so furtive and wild its restless eyes, it seemed alive and moving behind invisible bars.

Just under it, gorgeously set in its jewel-studded frame, stood the magic green table on which men staked their gold and lost their souls.

The rooms were crowded with Congressmen, Government officials, officers of the Army and Navy, clerks, contractors, paymasters, lobbyists, and professional gamblers.

The centre of an admiring group was a Congressman who had during the last session of the House broken the "bank" in a single night, winning more than a hundred thousand dollars. He had lost it all and more in two weeks, and the courteous proprietor now held orders for the lion's share of the total pay and mileage of nearly every member of the House of Representatives.

Over that table thousands of dollars of the people's money had been staked and lost during the war by quartermasters, paymasters, and agents in charge of public funds. Many a man had approached that green table with a stainless name and left it a perjured thief. Some had been carried out by those handsomely dressed waiters, and the man with the cold mouth could point out, if he would, more than one stain on the soft carpet which marked the end of a tragedy deeper than the pen of romancer has ever sounded.

Stoneman at the moment was playing. He was rarely a heavy player, but he had just staked a twenty-dollar gold piece and won fourteen hundred dollars.

Howle, always at his elbow ready for a "sleeper" or a stake, said:

"Put a stack on the ace."

He did so, lost, and repeated it twice.

"Do it again," urged Howle. "I'll stake my reputation that the ace wins this time."

With a doubting glance at Howle, old Stoneman shoved a stack of blue chips, worth fifty dollars, over the ace, playing it to win on Howle's judgment and reputation. It lost.

Without the ghost of a smile, the old statesman said: "Howle, you owe me five cents."

As he turned abruptly on his club foot from the table, he encountered the editor and his friends, a Western manufacturer and a Wall Street banker. They were soon seated at a table in a private room, over a dinner of choice oysters, diamond-back terrapin, canvas-back duck, and champagne.

They presented their plea for a truce in his fight until popular passion had subsided.

He heard them in silence. His answer was characteristic:

"The will of the people, gentlemen, is supreme," he said with a sneer. "We are the people. 'The man at the other end of the avenue' has dared to defy the will of Congress. He must go. If the Supreme Court lifts a finger in this fight, it will reduce that tribunal to one man or increase it to twenty at our pleasure."

"But the Constitution——" broke in the chairman.

"There are higher laws than paper compacts. We are conquerors treading conquered soil. Our will alone is the source of law. The drunken boor who claims to be President is in reality an alien of a conquered province."

"We protest," exclaimed the man of money, "against the use of such epithets in referring to the Chief Magistrate of the Republic!"

"And why, pray?" sneered the Commoner.

"In the name of common decency, law, and order. The President is a man of inherent power, even if he did learn to read after his marriage. Like many other Americans, he is a self-made man——"

"Glad to hear it," snapped Stoneman. "It relieves Almighty God of a fearful responsibility."

They left him in disgust and dismay.



CHAPTER X

TOSSED BY THE STORM

As the storm of passion raised by the clash between her father and the President rose steadily to the sweep of a cyclone, Elsie felt her own life but a leaf driven before its fury.

Her only comfort she found in Phil, whose letters to her were full of love for Margaret. He asked Elsie a thousand foolish questions about what she thought of his chances.

To her own confessions he was all sympathy.

"Of father's wild scheme of vengeance against the South," he wrote, "I am heartsick. I hate it on principle, to say nothing of a girl I know. I am with General Grant for peace and reconciliation. What does your lover think of it all? I can feel your anguish. The bill to rob the Southern people of their land, which I hear is pending, would send your sweetheart and mine, our enemies, into beggared exile. What will happen in the South? Riot and bloodshed, of course—perhaps a guerilla war of such fierce and terrible cruelty humanity sickens at the thought. I fear the Rebellion unhinged our father's reason on some things. He was too old to go to the front; the cannon's breath would have cleared the air and sweetened his temper. But its healing was denied. I believe the tawny leopardess who keeps his house influences him in this cruel madness. I could wring her neck with exquisite pleasure. Why he allows her to stay and cloud his life with her she-devil temper and fog his name with vulgar gossip is beyond me."

Seated in the park on the Capitol hill the day after her father had introduced his Confiscation Bill in the House, pending the impeachment of the President, she again attempted to draw Ben out as to his feelings on politics.

She waited in sickening fear and bristling pride for the first burst of his anger which would mean their separation.

"How do I feel?" he asked. "Don't feel at all. The surrender of General Lee was an event so stunning, my mind has not yet staggered past it. Nothing much can happen after that, so it don't matter."

"Negro suffrage don't matter?"

"No. We can manage the negro," he said calmly.

"With thousands of your own people disfranchised?"

"The negroes will vote with us, as they worked for us during the war. If they give them the ballot, they'll wish they hadn't."

Ben looked at her tenderly, bent near, and whispered:

"Don't waste your sweet breath talking about such things. My politics is bounded on the North by a pair of amber eyes, on the South by a dimpled little chin, on the East and West by a rosy cheek. Words do not frame its speech. Its language is a mere sign, a pressure of the lips—yet it thrills body and soul beyond all words."

Elsie leaned closer, and looking at the Capitol, said wistfully:

"I don't believe you know anything that goes on in that big marble building."

"Yes, I do."

"What happened there yesterday?"

"You honoured it by putting your beautiful feet on its steps. I saw the whole huge pile of cold marble suddenly glow with warm sunlight and flash with beauty as you entered it."

The girl nestled still closer to his side, feeling her utter helplessness in the rapids of the Niagara through which they were being whirled by blind and merciless forces. For the moment she forgot all fears in his nearness and the sweet pressure of his hand.



CHAPTER XI

THE SUPREME TEST

It is the glory of the American Republic that every man who has filled the office of President has grown in stature when clothed with its power and has proved himself worthy of its solemn trust. It is our highest claim to the respect of the world and the vindication of man's capacity to govern himself.

The impeachment of President Andrew Johnson would mark either the lowest tide-mud of degradation to which the Republic could sink, or its end. In this trial our system would be put to its severest strain. If a partisan majority in Congress could remove the Executive and defy the Supreme Court, stability to civic institutions was at an end, and the breath of a mob would become the sole standard of law.

Congress had thrown to the winds the last shreds of decency in its treatment of the Chief Magistrate. Stoneman led this campaign of insult, not merely from feelings of personal hate, but because he saw that thus the President's conviction before the Senate would become all but inevitable.

When his messages arrived from the White House they were thrown into the waste-basket without being read, amid jeers, hisses, curses, and ribald laughter.

In lieu of their reading, Stoneman would send to the Clerk's desk an obscene tirade from a party newspaper, and the Clerk of the House would read it amid the mocking groans, laughter, and applause of the floor and galleries.

A favourite clipping described the President as "an insolent drunken brute, in comparison with whom Caligula's horse was respectable."

In the Senate, whose members were to sit as sworn judges to decide the question of impeachment, Charles Sumner used language so vulgar that he was called to order. Sustained by the Chair and the Senate, he repeated it with increased violence, concluding with cold venom:

"Andrew Johnson has become the successor of Jefferson Davis. In holding him up to judgment I do not dwell on his beastly intoxication the day he took the oath as Vice-president, nor do I dwell on his maudlin speeches by which he has degraded the country, nor hearken to the reports of pardons sold, or of personal corruption. These things are bad. But he has usurped the powers of Congress."

Conover, the perjured wretch, in prison for his crimes as a professional witness in the assassination trial, now circulated the rumour that he could give evidence that President Johnson was the assassin of Lincoln. Without a moment's hesitation, Stoneman's henchmen sent a petition to the President for the pardon of this villain that he might turn against the man who had pardoned him and swear his life away! This scoundrel was borne in triumph from prison to the Capitol and placed before the Impeachment Committee, to whom he poured out his wondrous tale.

The sewers and prisons were dragged for every scrap of testimony to be found, and the day for the trial approached.

As it drew nearer, excitement grew intense. Swarms of adventurers expecting the overthrow of the Government crowded into Washington. Dreams of honours, profits, and division of spoils held riot. Gamblers thronged the saloons and gaming-houses, betting their gold on the President's head.

Stoneman found the business more serious than even his daring spirit had dreamed. His health suddenly gave way under the strain, and he was put to bed by his physician with the warning that the least excitement would be instantly fatal.

Elsie entered the little Black House on the hill for the first time since her trip at the age of twelve, some eight years before. She installed an army nurse, took charge of the place, and ignored the existence of the brown woman, refusing to speak to her or permit her to enter her father's room.

His illness made it necessary to choose an assistant to conduct the case before the High Court. There was but one member of the House whose character and ability fitted him for the place—General Benj. F. Butler, of Massachusetts, whose name was enough to start a riot in any assembly in America.

His selection precipitated a storm at the Capitol. A member leaped to his feet on the floor of the House and shouted:

"If I were to characterize all that is pusillanimous in war, inhuman in peace, forbidden in morals, and corrupt in politics, I could name it in one word—Butlerism!"

For this speech he was ordered to apologize, and when he refused with scorn they voted that the Speaker publicly censure him. The Speaker did so, but winked at the offender while uttering the censure.

John A. Bingham, of Ohio, who had been chosen for his powers of oratory to make the principal speech against the President, rose in the House and indignantly refused to serve on the Board of Impeachment with such a man.

General Butler replied with crushing insolence:

"It is true, Mr. Speaker, that I may have made an error of judgment in trying to blow up Fort Fisher with a powder ship at sea. I did the best I could with the talents God gave me. An angel could have done no more. At least I bared my own breast in my country's defence—a thing the distinguished gentleman who insults me has not ventured to do—his only claim to greatness being that, behind prison walls, on perjured testimony, his fervid eloquence sent an innocent American mother screaming to the gallows."

The fight was ended only by an order from the old Commoner's bed to Bingham to shut his mouth and work with Butler. When the President had been crushed, then they could settle Kilkenny-cat issues. Bingham obeyed.

When the august tribunal assembled in the Senate Chamber, fifty-five Senators, presided over by Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, constituted the tribunal. They took their seats in a semicircle in front of the Vice-president's desk at which the Chief Justice sat. Behind them crowded the one hundred and ninety members of the House of Representatives, the accusers of the ruler of the mightiest Republic in human history. Every inch of space in the galleries was crowded with brilliantly dressed men and women, army officers in gorgeous uniforms, and the pomp and splendour of the ministers of every foreign court of the world. In spectacular grandeur no such scene was ever before witnessed in the annals of justice.

The peculiar personal appearance of General Butler, whose bald head shone with insolence while his eye seemed to be winking over his record as a warrior and making fun of his fellow-manager Bingham, added a touch of humour to the solemn scene.

The magnificent head of the Chief Justice suggested strange thoughts to the beholder. He had been summoned but the day before to try Jefferson Davis for the treason of declaring the Southern States out of the Union. To-day he sat down to try the President of the United States for declaring them to be in the Union! He had protested with warmth that he could not conduct both these trials at once.

The Chief Justice took oath to "do impartial justice according to the Constitution and the laws," and to the chagrin of Sumner administered this oath to each Senator in turn. When Benjamin F. Wade's name was called, Hendricks, of Indiana, objected to his sitting as judge. He could succeed temporarily to the Presidency, as the presiding officer of the Senate, and his own vote might decide the fate of the accused and determine his own succession. The law forbids the Vice-president to sit on such trials. It should apply with more vigour in his case. Besides, he had without a hearing already pronounced the President guilty.

Sumner, forgetting his motion to prevent Stockton's voting against his own expulsion, flew to the defence of Wade. Hendricks smilingly withdrew his objection, and "Bluff Ben Wade" took the oath and sat down to judge his own cause with unruffled front.

When the case was complete, the whole bill of indictment stood forth a tissue of stupid malignity without a shred of evidence to support its charges.

On the last day of the trial, when the closing speeches were being made, there was a stir at the door. The throng of men, packing every inch of floor space, were pushed rudely aside. The crowd craned their necks, Senators turned and looked behind them to see what the disturbance meant, and the Chief Justice rapped for order.

Suddenly through the dense mass appeared the forms of two gigantic negroes carrying an old man. His grim face, white and rigid, and his big club foot hanging pathetically from those black arms, could not be mistaken. A thrill of excitement swept the floor and galleries, and a faint cheer rippled the surface, quickly suppressed by the gavel.

The negroes placed him in an armchair facing the semicircle of Senators, and crouched down on their haunches beside him. Their kinky heads, black skin, thick lips, white teeth, and flat noses made for the moment a curious symbolic frame for the chalk-white passion of the old Commoner's face.

No sculptor ever dreamed a more sinister emblem of the corruption of a race of empire builders than this group. Its black figures, wrapped in the night of four thousand years of barbarism, squatted there the "equal" of their master, grinning at his forms of justice, the evolution of forty centuries of Aryan genius. To their brute strength the white fanatic in the madness of his hate had appealed, and for their hire he had bartered the birthright of a mighty race of freemen.

The speaker hurried to his conclusion that the half-fainting master might deliver his message. In the meanwhile his eyes, cold and thrilling, sought the secrets of the souls of the judges before him.

He had not come to plead or persuade. He had eluded the vigilance of his daughter and nurse, escaped with the aid of the brown woman and her black allies, and at the peril of his life had come to command. Every energy of his indomitable will he was using now to keep from fainting. He felt that if he could but look those men in the face they would not dare to defy his word.

He shambled painfully to his feet amid a silence that was awful. Again the sheer wonder of the man's personality held the imagination of the audience. His audacity, his fanaticism, and the strange contradictions of his character stirred the mind of friend and foe alike—this man who tottered there before them, holding off Death with his big ugly left hand, while with his right he clutched at the throat of his foe! Honest and dishonest, cruel and tender, great and mean, a party leader who scorned public opinion, a man of conviction, yet the most unscrupulous politician, a philosopher who preached the equality of man, yet a tyrant who hated the world and despised all men!

His very presence before them an open defiance of love and life and death, would not his word ring omnipotent when the verdict was rendered? Every man in the great courtroom believed it as he looked on the rows of Senators hanging on his lips.

He spoke at first with unnatural vigour, a faint flush of fever lighting his white face, his voice quivering yet penetrating.

"Upon that man among you who shall dare to acquit the President," he boldly threatened, "I hurl the everlasting curse of a Nation—an infamy that shall rive and blast his children's children until they shrink from their own name as from the touch of pollution!"

He gasped for breath, his restless hands fumbled at his throat, he staggered and would have fallen had not his black guards caught him. He revived, pushed them back on their haunches, and sat down. And then, with his big club foot thrust straight in front of him, his gnarled hands gripping the arms of his chair, the massive head shaking back and forth like a wounded lion, he continued his speech, which grew in fierce intensity with each laboured breath.

The effect was electrical. Every Senator leaned forward to catch the lowest whisper, and so awful was the suspense in the galleries the listeners grew faint.

When this last mad challenge was hurled into the teeth of the judges, the dazed crowd paused for breath and the galleries burst into a storm of applause.

In vain the Chief Justice rose, his lionlike face livid with anger, pounded for order, and commanded the galleries to be cleared.

They laughed at him. Roar after roar was the answer. The Chief Justice in loud angry tones ordered the Sergeant-at-Arms to clear the galleries.

Men leaned over the rail and shouted in his face:

"He can't do it!"

"He hasn't got men enough!"

"Let him try if he dares!"

The doorkeepers attempted to enforce order by announcing it in the name of the peace and dignity and sovereign power of the Senate over its sacred chamber. The crowd had now become a howling mob which jeered them.

Senator Grimes, of Iowa, rose and demanded the reason why the Senate was thus insulted and the order had not been enforced.

A volley of hisses greeted his question.

The Chief Justice, evidently quite nervous, declared the order would be enforced.

Senator Trumbull, of Illinois, moved that the offenders be arrested.

In reply the crowd yelled:

"We'd like to see you do it!"

At length the mob began to slowly leave the galleries under the impression that the High Court had adjourned.

Suddenly a man cried out:

"Hold on! They ain't going to adjourn. Let's see it out!"

Hundreds took their seats again. In the corridors a crowd began to sing in wild chorus:

"Old Grimes is dead, that poor old man." The women joined with glee. Between the verses the leader would curse the Iowa Senator as a traitor and copperhead. The singing could be distinctly heard by the Court as its roar floated through the open doors.

When the Senate Chamber had been cleared and the most disgraceful scene that ever occurred within its portals had closed, the High Court Impeachment went into secret session to consider the evidence and its verdict.

Within an hour from its adjournment it was known to the Managers that seven Republican Senators were doubtful, and that they formed a group under the leadership of two great constitutional lawyers who still believed in the sanctity of a judge's oath—Lyman Trumbull, of Illinois, and William Pitt Fessenden, of Maine. Around them had gathered Senators Grimes, of Iowa, Van Winkle, of West Virginia, Fowler, of Tennessee, Henderson, of Missouri, and Ross, of Kansas. The Managers were in a panic. If these men dared to hold together with the twelve Democrats, the President would be acquitted by one vote—they could count thirty-four certain for conviction.

The Revolutionists threw to the winds the last scruple of decency, went into caucus and organized a conspiracy for forcing, within the few days which must pass before the verdict, these judges to submit to their decree.

Fessenden and Trumbull were threatened with impeachment and expulsion from the Senate and bombarded by the most furious assaults from the press, which denounced them as infamous traitors, "as mean, repulsive, and noxious as hedgehogs in the cages of a travelling menagerie."

A mass meeting was held in Washington which said:

"Resolved, that we impeach Fessenden, Trumbull, and Grimes at the bar of justice and humanity, as traitors before whose guilt the infamy of Benedict Arnold becomes respectability and decency."

The Managers sent out a circular telegram to every State from which came a doubtful judge:

"Great danger to the peace of the country if impeachment fails. Send your Senators public opinion by resolutions, letters, and delegates."

The man who excited most wrath was Ross, of Kansas. That Kansas of all States should send a "traitor" was more than the spirits of the Revolutionists could bear.

A mass meeting in Leavenworth accordingly sent him the telegram:

"Kansas has heard the evidence and demands the conviction of the President.

"D. R. Anthony and 1,000 others."

To this Ross replied:

"I have taken an oath to do impartial justice. I trust I shall have the courage and honesty to vote according to the dictates of my judgment and for the highest good of my country."

He got his answer:

"Your motives are Indian contracts and greenbacks. Kansas repudiates you as she does all perjurers and skunks."

The Managers organized an inquisition for the purpose of torturing and badgering Ross into submission. His one vote was all they lacked.

They laid siege to little Vinnie Ream, the sculptress, to whom Congress had awarded a contract for the statue of Lincoln. Her studio was in the crypt of the Capitol. They threatened her with the wrath of Congress, the loss of her contract, and ruin of her career unless she found a way to induce Senator Ross, whom she knew, to vote against the President.

Such an attempt to gain by fraud the verdict of a common court of law would have sent its promoters to prison for felony. Yet the Managers of this case, before the highest tribunal of the world, not only did it without a blush of shame, but cursed as a traitor every man who dared to question their motives.

As the day approached for the Court to vote, Senator Ross remained to friend and foe a sealed mystery. Reporters swarmed about him, the target of a thousand eyes. His rooms were besieged by his radical constituents who had been imported from Kansas in droves to browbeat him into a promise to convict. His movements day and night, his breakfast, his dinner, his supper, the clothes he wore, the colour of his cravat, his friends and companions, were chronicled in hourly bulletins and flashed over the wires from the delirious Capital.

Chief Justice Chase called the High Court of Impeachment to order, to render its verdict. Old Stoneman had again been carried to his chair in the arms of two negroes, and sat with his cold eyes searching the faces of the judges.

The excitement had reached the highest pitch of intensity. A sense of choking solemnity brooded over the scene. The feeling grew that the hour had struck which would test the capacity of man to establish an enduring Republic.

The Clerk read the Eleventh Article, drawn by the Great Commoner as the supreme test.

As its last words died away the Chief Justice rose amid a silence that was agony, placed his hands on the sides of the desk as if to steady himself, and said:

"Call the roll."

Each Senator answered "Guilty" or "Not Guilty," exactly as they had been counted by the Managers, until Fessenden's name was called.

A moment of stillness and the great lawyer's voice rang high, cold, clear, and resonant as a Puritan church bell on Sunday morning:

"Not Guilty!"

A murmur, half groan and sigh, half cheer and cry, rippled the great hall.

The other votes were discounted now save that of Edmund G. Ross, of Kansas. No human being on earth knew what this man would do save the silent invisible man within his soul.

Over the solemn trembling silence the voice of the Chief Justice rang:

"Senator Ross, how say you? Is the respondent, Andrew Johnson, guilty or not guilty of a high misdemeanor as charged in this article?"

The great Judge bent forward; his brow furrowed as Ross arose.

His fellow Senators watched him spellbound. A thousand men and women, hanging from the galleries, focused their eyes on him. Old Stoneman drew his bristling brows down, watching him like an adder ready to strike, his lower lip protruding, his jaws clinched as a vise, his hands fumbling the arms of his chair.

Every breath is held, every ear strained, as the answer falls from the sturdy Scotchman like the peal of a trumpet:

"Not Guilty!"

The crowd breathes—a pause, a murmur, the shuffle of a thousand feet——

The President is acquitted, and the Republic lives!

The House assembled and received the report of the verdict. Old Stoneman pulled himself half erect, holding to his desk, addressed the Speaker, introduced his second bill for the impeachment of the President, and fell fainting in the arms of his black attendants.



CHAPTER XII

TRIUMPH IN DEFEAT

Upon the failure to convict the President, Edwin M. Stanton resigned, sank into despair and died, and a soldier Secretary of War opened the prison doors.

Ben Cameron and his father hurried Southward to a home and land passing under a cloud darker than the dust and smoke of blood-soaked battlefields—the Black Plague of Reconstruction.

For two weeks the old Commoner wrestled in silence with Death. When at last he spoke, it was to the stalwart negroes who had called to see him and were standing by his bedside.

Turning his deep-sunken eyes on them a moment, he said slowly:

"I wonder whom I'll get to carry me when you boys die!"

Elsie hurried to his side and kissed him tenderly. For a week his mind hovered in the twilight that lies between time and eternity. He seemed to forget the passions and fury of his fierce career and live over the memories of his youth, recalling pathetically its bitter poverty and its fair dreams. He would lie for hours and hold Elsie's hand, pressing it gently.

In one of his lucid moments he said:

"How beautiful you are, my child! You shall be a queen. I've dreamed of boundless wealth for you and my boy. My plans are Napoleonic—and I shall not fail—never fear—aye, beyond the dreams of avarice!"

"I wish no wealth save the heart treasure of those I love, father," was the soft answer.

"Of course, little day-dreamer. But the old cynic who has outlived himself and knows the mockery of time and things will be wisdom for your foolishness. You shall keep your toys. What pleases you shall please me. Yet I will be wise for us both."

She laid her hand upon his lips, and he kissed the warm little fingers.

In these days of soul-nearness the iron heart softened as never before in love toward his children. Phil had hurried home from the West and secured his release from the remaining weeks of his term of service.

As the father lay watching them move about the room, the cold light in his deep-set wonderful eyes would melt into a soft glow.

As he grew stronger, the old fierce spirit of the unconquered leader began to assert itself. He would take up the fight where he left it off and carry it to victory.

Elsie and Phil sent the doctor to tell him the truth and beg him to quit politics.

"Your work is done; you have but three months to live unless you go South and find new life," was the verdict.

"In either event I go to a warmer climate, eh, doctor?" said the cynic.

"Perhaps," was the laughing reply.

"Good. It suits me better. I've had the move in mind. I can do more effective work in the South for the next two years. Your decision is fate. I'll go at once."

The doctor was taken aback.

"Come now," he said persuasively. "Let a disinterested Englishman give you some advice. You've never taken any before. I give it as medicine, and I won't put it on your bill. Slow down on politics. Your recent defeat should teach you a lesson in conservatism."

The old Commoner's powerful mouth became rigid, and the lower lip bulged:

"Conservatism—fossil putrefaction!"

"But defeat?"

"Defeat?" cried the old man. "Who said I was defeated? The South lies in ashes at my feet—the very names of her proud States blotted from history. The Supreme Court awaits my nod. True, there's a man boarding in the White House, and I vote to pay his bills; but the page who answers my beck and call has more power. Every measure on which I've set my heart is law, save one—my Confiscation Act—and this but waits the fulness of time."

The doctor, who was walking back and forth with his hands folded behind him, paused and said:

"I marvel that a man of your personal integrity could conceive such a measure; you, who refused to accept the legal release of your debts until the last farthing was paid—you, whose cruelty of the lip is hideous, and yet beneath it so gentle a personality, I've seen the pages in the House stand at your back and mimic you while speaking, secure in the smile with which you turned to greet their fun. And yet you press this crime upon a brave and generous foe?"

"A wrong can have no rights," said Stoneman calmly. "Slavery will not be dead until the landed aristocracy on which it rested is destroyed. I am not cruel or unjust. I am but fulfilling the largest vision of universal democracy that ever stirred the soul of man—a democracy that shall know neither rich nor poor, bond nor free, white nor black. If I use the wild pulse-beat of the rage of millions, it is only a means to an end—this grander vision of the soul."

"Then why not begin at home this vision, and give the stricken South a moment to rise?"

"No. The North is impervious to change, rich, proud, and unscathed by war. The South is in chaos and cannot resist. It is but the justice and wisdom of Heaven that the negro shall rule the land of his bondage. It is the only solution of the race problem. Lincoln's contention that we could not live half white and half black is sound at the core. When we proclaim equality, social, political, and economic for the negro, we mean always to enforce it in the South. The negro will never be treated as an equal in the North. We are simply a set of cold-blooded liars on that subject, and always have been. To the Yankee the very physical touch of a negro is pollution."

"Then you don't believe this twaddle about equality?" asked the doctor.

"Yes and no. Mankind in the large is a herd of mercenary gudgeons or fools. As a lawyer in Pennsylvania I have defended fifty murderers on trial for their lives. Forty-nine of them were guilty. All these I succeeded in acquitting. One of them was innocent. This one they hung. Can a man keep his face straight in such a world? Could negro blood degrade such stock? Might not an ape improve it? I preach equality as a poet and seer who sees a vision beyond the rim of the horizon of to-day."

The old man's eyes shone with the set stare of a fanatic.

"And you think the South is ready for this wild vision?"

"Not ready, but helpless to resist. As a cold-blooded, scientific experiment, I mean to give the Black Man one turn at the Wheel of Life. It is an act of just retribution. Besides, in my plans I need his vote; and that settles it."

"But will your plans work? Your own reports show serious trouble in the South already."

Stoneman laughed.

"I never read my own reports. They are printed in molasses to catch flies. The Southern legislatures played into my hands by copying the laws of New England relating to Servants, Masters, Apprentices, and Vagrants. But even these were repealed at the first breath of criticism. Neither the Freedman's Bureau nor the army has ever loosed its grip on the throat of the South for a moment. These disturbances and 'atrocities' are dangerous only when printed on campaign fly-paper."

"And how will you master and control these ten great Southern States?"

"Through my Reconstruction Acts by means of the Union League. As a secret between us, I am the soul of this order. I organized it in 1863 to secure my plan of confiscation. We pressed it on Lincoln. He repudiated it. We nominated Fremont at Cleveland against Lincoln in '64, and tried to split the party or force Lincoln to retire. Fremont, a conceited ass, went back on this plank in our platform, and we dropped him and helped elect Lincoln again."

"I thought the Union League a patriotic and social organization?" said the doctor in surprise.

"It has these features, but its sole aim as a secret order is to confiscate the property of the South. I will perfect this mighty organization until every negro stands drilled in serried line beneath its banners, send a solid delegation here to do my bidding, and return at the end of two years with a majority so overwhelming that my word will be law. I will pass my Confiscation Bill. If Ulysses S. Grant, the coming idol, falters, my second bill of Impeachment will only need the change of a name."

The doctor shook his head.

"Give up this madness. Your life is hanging by a thread. The Southern people even in their despair will never drink this black broth you are pressing to their lips."

"They've got to drink it."

"Your decision is unalterable?"

"Absolutely. It's the breath I breathe. As my physician you may select the place to which I shall be banished. It must be reached by rail and wire. I care not its name or size. I'll make it the capital of the Nation. There'll be poetic justice in setting up my establishment in a fallen slaveholder's mansion."

The doctor looked intently at the old man:

"The study of men has become a sort of passion with me, but you are the deepest mystery I've yet encountered in this land of surprises."

"And why?" asked the cynic.

"Because the secret of personality resides in motives, and I can't find yours either in your actions or words."

Stoneman glanced at him sharply from beneath his wrinkled brows and snapped.

"Keep on guessing."

"I will. In the meantime I'm going to send you to the village of Piedmont, South Carolina. Your son and daughter both seem enthusiastic over this spot."

"Good; that settles it. And now that mine own have been conspiring against me," said Stoneman confidentially, "a little guile on my part. Not a word of what has passed between us to my children. Tell them I agree with your plans and give up my work. I'll give the same story to the press—I wish nothing to mar their happiness while in the South. My secret burdens need not cloud their young lives."

Dr. Barnes took the old man by the hand:

"I promise. My assistant has agreed to go with you. I'll say good-bye. It's an inspiration to look into a face like yours, lit by the splendour of an unconquerable will! But I want to say something to you before you set out on this journey."

"Out with it," said the Commoner.

"The breed to which the Southern white man belongs has conquered every foot of soil on this earth their feet have pressed for a thousand years. A handful of them hold in subjection three hundred millions in India. Place a dozen of them in the heart of Africa, and they will rule the continent unless you kill them——"

"Wait," cried Stoneman, "until I put a ballot in the hand of every negro and a bayonet at the breast of every white man from the James to the Rio Grande!"

"I'll tell you a little story," said the doctor with a smile. "I once had a half-grown eagle in a cage in my yard. The door was left open one day, and a meddlesome rooster hopped in to pick a fight. The eagle had been sick a week and seemed an easy mark. I watched. The rooster jumped and wheeled and spurred and picked pieces out of his topknot. The young eagle didn't know at first what he meant. He walked around dazed, with a hurt expression. When at last it dawned on him what the chicken was about, he simply reached out one claw, took the rooster by the neck, planted the other claw in his breast, and snatched his head off."

The old man snapped his massive jaws together and grunted contemptuously.

————————————————————————————————————-

Book III—The Reign of Terror



CHAPTER I

A FALLEN SLAVEHOLDER'S MANSION

Piedmont, South Carolina, which Elsie and Phil had selected for reasons best known to themselves as the place of retreat for their father, was a favourite summer resort of Charleston people before the war.

Ulster county, of which this village was the capital, bordered on the North Carolina line, lying alongside the ancient shore of York. It was settled by the Scotch folk who came from the North of Ireland in the great migrations which gave America three hundred thousand people of Covenanter martyr blood, the largest and most important addition to our population, larger in number than either the Puritans of New England or the so-called Cavaliers of Virginia and Eastern Carolina; and far more important than either, in the growth of American nationality.

To a man they had hated Great Britain. Not a Tory was found among them. The cries of their martyred dead were still ringing in their souls when George III started on his career of oppression. The fiery words of Patrick Henry, their spokesman in the valley of Virginia, had swept the aristocracy of the Old Dominion into rebellion against the King and on into triumphant Democracy. They had made North Carolina the first home of freedom in the New World, issued the first Declaration of Independence in Mecklenburg, and lifted the first banner of rebellion against the tyranny of the Crown.

They grew to the soil wherever they stopped, always home lovers and home builders, loyal to their own people, instinctive clan leaders and clan followers. A sturdy, honest, covenant-keeping, God-fearing, fighting people, above all things they hated sham and pretence. They never boasted of their families, though some of them might have quartered the royal arms of Scotland on their shields.

To these sturdy qualities had been added a strain of Huguenot tenderness and vivacity.

The culture of cotton as the sole industry had fixed African slavery as their economic system. With the heritage of the Old World had been blended forces inherent in the earth and air of the new Southland, something of the breath of its unbroken forests, the freedom of its untrod mountains, the temper of its sun, and the sweetness of its tropic perfumes.

When Mrs. Cameron received Elsie's letter, asking her to secure for them six good rooms at the "Palmetto" hotel, she laughed. The big rambling hostelry had been burned by roving negroes, pigs were wallowing in the sulphur springs, and along its walks, where lovers of olden days had strolled, the cows were browsing on the shrubbery.

But she laughed for a more important reason. They had asked for a six-room cottage if accommodations could not be had in the hotel.

She could put them in the Lenoir place. The cotton crop from their farm had been stolen from the gin—the cotton tax of $200 could not be paid, and a mortgage was about to be foreclosed on both their farm and home. She had been brooding over their troubles in despair. The Stonemans' coming was a godsend.

Mrs. Cameron was helping them set the house in order to receive the new tenants.

"I declare," said Mrs. Lenoir gratefully. "It seems too good to be true. Just as I was about to give up—the first time in my life—here came those rich Yankees and with enough rent to pay the interest on the mortgages and our board at the hotel. I'll teach Margaret to paint, and she can give Marion lessons on the piano. The darkest hour's just before day. And last week I cried when they told me I must lose the farm."

"I was heartsick over it for you."

"You know, the farm was my dowry with the dozen slaves Papa gave us on our wedding-day. The negroes did as they pleased, yet we managed to live and were very happy."

Marion entered and placed a bouquet of roses on the table, touching them daintily until she stood each flower apart in careless splendour. Their perfume, the girl's wistful dreamy blue eyes and shy elusive beauty, all seemed a part of the warm sweet air of the June morning. Mrs. Lenoir watched her lovingly.

"Mamma, I'm going to put flowers in every room. I'm sure they haven't such lovely ones in Washington," said Marion eagerly, as she skipped out.

The two women moved to the open window, through which came the drone of bees and the distant music of the river falls.

"Marion's greatest charm," whispered her mother, "is in her way of doing things easily and gently without a trace of effort. Watch her bend over to get that rose. Did you ever see anything like the grace and symmetry of her figure—she seems a living flower!"

"Jeannie, you're making an idol of her——"

"Why not? With all our troubles and poverty, I'm rich in her! She's fifteen years old, her head teeming with romance. You know, I was married at fifteen. There'll be a half dozen boys to see her to-night in our new home—all of them head over heels in love with her."

"Oh, Jeannie, you must not be so silly! We should worship God only."

"Isn't she God's message to me and to the world?"

"But if anything should happen to her——"

The young mother laughed. "I never think of it. Some things are fixed. Her happiness and beauty are to me the sign of God's presence."

"Well, I'm glad you're coming to live with us in the heart of town. This place is a cosey nest, just such a one as a poet lover would build here in the edge of these deep woods, but it is too far out for you to be alone. Dr. Cameron has been worrying about you ever since he came home."

"I'm not afraid of the negroes. I don't know one of them who wouldn't go out of his way to do me a favour. Old Aleck is the only rascal I know among them, and he's too busy with politics now even to steal a chicken."

"And Gus, the young scamp we used to own; you haven't forgotten him? He is back here, a member of the company of negro troops, and parades before the house every day to show off his uniform. Dr. Cameron told him yesterday he'd thrash him if he caught him hanging around the place again. He frightened Margaret nearly to death when she went to the barn to feed her horse."

"I've never known the meaning of fear. We used to roam the woods and fields together all hours of the day and night: my lover, Marion, and I. This panic seems absurd to me."

"Well, I'll be glad to get you two children under my wing. I was afraid I'd find you in tears over moving from your nest."

"No, where Marion is I'm at home, and I'll feel I've a mother when I get with you."

"Will you come to the hotel before they arrive?"

"No; I'll welcome and tell them how glad I am they have brought me good luck."

"I'm delighted, Jeannie. I wished you to do this, but I couldn't ask it. I can never do enough for this old man's daughter. We must make their stay happy. They say he's a terrible old Radical politician, but I suppose he's no meaner than the others. He's very ill, and she loves him devotedly. He is coming here to find health, and not to insult us. Besides, he was kind to me. He wrote a letter to the President. Nothing that I have will be too good for him or for his. It's very brave and sweet of you to stay and meet them."

"I'm doing it to please Marion. She suggested it last night, sitting out on the porch in the twilight. She slipped her arm around me and said:

"'Mamma, we must welcome them and make them feel at home. He is very ill. They will be tired and homesick. Suppose it were you and I, and we were taking my Papa to a strange place.'"

* * * * *

When the Stonemans arrived, the old man was too ill and nervous from the fatigue of the long journey to notice his surroundings or to be conscious of the restful beauty of the cottage into which they carried him. His room looked out over the valley of the river for miles, and the glimpse he got of its broad fertile acres only confirmed his ideas of the "slaveholding oligarchy" it was his life-purpose to crush. Over the mantel hung a steel engraving of Calhoun. He fell asleep with his deep, sunken eyes resting on it and a cynical smile playing about his grim mouth.

Margaret and Mrs. Cameron had met the Stonemans and their physician at the train, and taken Elsie and her father in the old weather-beaten family carriage to the Lenoir cottage, apologising for Ben's absence.

"He has gone to Nashville on some important legal business, and the doctor is ailing, but as the head of the clan Cameron he told me to welcome your father to the hospitality of the county, and beg him to let us know if he could be of help."

The old man, who sat in a stupor of exhaustion, made no response, and Elsie hastened to say:

"We appreciate your kindness more than I can tell you, Mrs. Cameron. I trust father will be better in a day or two, when he will thank you. The trip has been more than he could bear."

"I am expecting Ben home this week," the mother whispered. "I need not tell you that he will be delighted at your coming."

Elsie smiled and blushed.

"And I'll expect Captain Stoneman to see me very soon," said Margaret softly. "You will not forget to tell him for me?"

"He's a very retiring young man," said Elsie, "and pretends to be busy about our baggage just now. I'm sure he will find the way."

Elsie fell in love at sight with Marion and her mother. Their easy genial manners, the genuineness of their welcome, and the simple kindness with which they sought to make her feel at home put her heart into a warm glow.

Mrs. Lenoir explained the conveniences of the place and apologized for its defects, the results of the war.

"I am sorry about the window curtains—we have used them all for dresses. Marion is a genius with a needle, and we took the last pair out of the parlour to make a dress for a birthday party. The year before, we used the ones in my room for a costume at a starvation party in a benefit for our rector—you know we're Episcopalians—strayed up here for our health from Charleston among these good Scotch Presbyterians."

"We will soon place curtains at the windows," said Elsie cheerfully.

"The carpets were sent to the soldiers for blankets during the war. It was all we could do for our poor boys, except to cut my hair and sell it. You see my hair hasn't grown out yet. I sent it to Richmond the last year of the war. I felt I must do something when my neighbours were giving so much. You know Mrs. Cameron lost four boys."

"I prefer the floors bare," Elsie replied. "We will get a few rugs."

She looked at the girlish hair hanging in ringlets about Mrs. Lenoir's handsome face, smiled pathetically, and asked:

"Did you really make such sacrifices for your cause?"

"Yes, indeed. I was glad when the war was ended for some things. We certainly needed a few pins, needles, and buttons, to say nothing of a cup of coffee or tea."

"I trust you will never lack for anything again," said Elsie kindly.

"You will bring us good luck," Mrs. Lenoir responded. "Your coming is so fortunate. The cotton tax Congress levied was so heavy this year we were going to lose everything. Such a tax when we are all about to starve! Dr. Cameron says it was an act of stupid vengeance on the South, and that no other farmers in America have their crops taxed by the National Government. I am so glad your father has come. He is not hunting for an office. He can help us, maybe."

"I am sure he will," answered Elsie thoughtfully.

Marion ran up the steps lightly, her hair dishevelled and face flushed.

"Now, Mamma, it's almost sundown; you get ready to go. I want her awhile to show her about my things."

She took Elsie shyly by the hand and led her into the lawn, while her mother paid a visit to each room, and made up the last bundle of odds and ends she meant to carry to the hotel.

"I hope you will love the place as we do," said the girl simply.

"I think it very beautiful and restful," Elsie replied. "This wilderness of flowers looks like fairyland. You have roses running on the porch around the whole length of the house."

"Yes, Papa was crazy over the trailing roses, and kept planting them until the house seems just a frame built to hold them, with a roof on it. But you can see the river through the arches from three sides. Ben Cameron helped me set that big beauty on the south corner the day he ran away to the war——"

"The view is glorious!" Elsie exclaimed, looking in rapture over the river valley.

The village of Piedmont crowned an immense hill on the banks of the Broad River, just where it dashes over the last stone barrier in a series of beautiful falls and spreads out in peaceful glory through the plains toward Columbia and the distant sea. The muffled roar of these falls, rising softly through the trees on its wooded cliff, held the daily life of the people in the spell of distant music. In fair weather it soothed and charmed, and in storm and freshet rose to the deep solemn growl of thunder.

The river made a sharp bend as it emerged from the hills and flowed westward for six miles before it turned south again. Beyond this six-mile sweep of its broad channel loomed the three ranges of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the first one dark, rich, distinct, clothed in eternal green, the last one melting in dim lines into the clouds and soft azure of the sky.

As the sun began to sink now behind these distant peaks, each cloud that hung about them burst into a blazing riot of colour. The silver mirror of the river caught their shadows, and the water glowed in sympathy.

As Elsie drank the beauty of the scene, the music of the falls ringing its soft accompaniment, her heart went out in a throb of love and pity for the land and its people.

"Can you blame us for loving such a spot?" said Marion. "It's far more beautiful from the cliff at Lover's Leap. I'll take you there some day. My father used to tell me that this world was Heaven, and that the spirits would all come back to live here when sin and shame and strife were gone."

"Are your father's poems published?" asked Elsie.

"Only in the papers. We have them clipped and pasted in a scrapbook. I'll show you the one about Ben Cameron some day. You met him in Washington, didn't you?"

"Yes," said Elsie quietly.

"Then I know he made love to you."

"Why?"

"You're so pretty. He couldn't help it."

"Does he make love to every pretty girl?"

"Always. It's his religion. But he does it so beautifully you can't help believing it, until you compare notes with the other girls."

"Did he make love to you?"

"He broke my heart when he ran away. I cried a whole week. But I got over it. He seemed so big and grown when he came home this last time. I was afraid to let him kiss me."

"Did he dare to try?"

"No, and it hurt my feelings. You see, I'm not quite old enough to be serious with the big boys, and he looked so brave and handsome with that ugly scar on the edge of his forehead, and everybody was so proud of him. I was just dying to kiss him, and I thought it downright mean in him not to offer it."

"Would you have let him?"

"I expected him to try."

"He is very popular in Piedmont?"

"Every girl in town is in love with him."

"And he in love with all?"

"He pretends to be—but between us, he's a great flirt. He's gone to Nashville now on some pretended business. Goodness only knows where he got the money to go. I believe there's a girl there."

"Why?"

"Because he was so mysterious about his trip. I'll keep an eye on him at the hotel. You know Margaret, too, don't you?"

"Yes; we met her in Washington."

"Well, she's the slyest flirt in town—it runs in the blood—has a half-dozen beaux to see her every day. She plays the organ in the Presbyterian Sunday school, and the young minister is dead in love with her. They say they are engaged. I don't believe it. I think it's another one. But I must hurry, I've so much to show and tell you. Come here to the honeysuckle——"

Marion drew the vines apart from the top of the fence and revealed a mocking-bird on her nest.

"She's setting. Don't let anything hurt her. I'd push her off and show you her speckled eggs, but it's so late."

"Oh, I wouldn't hurt her for the world!" cried Elsie with delight.

"And right here," said Marion, bending gracefully over a tall bunch of grass, "is a pee-wee's nest, four darling little eggs; look out for that."

Elsie bent and saw the pretty nest perched on stems of grass, and over it the taller leaves drawn to a point.

"Isn't it cute!" she murmured.

"Yes; I've six of these and three mocking-bird nests. I'll show them to you. But the most particular one of all is the wren's nest in the fork of the cedar, close to the house."

She led Elsie to the tree, and about two feet from the ground, in the forks of the trunk, was a tiny hole from which peeped the eyes of a wren.

"Whatever you do, don't let anything hurt her. Her mate sings 'Free-nigger! Free-nigger! Free-nigger!' every morning in this cedar."

"And you think we will specially enjoy that?" asked Elsie, laughing.

"Now, really," cried Marion, taking Elsie's hand, "you know I couldn't think of such a mean joke. I forgot you were from the North. You seem so sweet and homelike. He really does sing that way. You will hear him in the morning, bright and early, 'Free-nigger! Free-nigger! Free-nigger!' just as plain as I'm saying it."

"And did you learn to find all these birds' nests by yourself?"

"Papa taught me. I've got some jay-birds and some cat-birds so gentle they hop right down at my feet. Some people hate jay-birds. But I like them, they seem to be having such a fine time and enjoy life so. You don't mind jay-birds, do you?"

"I love every bird that flies."

"Except hawks and owls and buzzards——"

"Well, I've seen so few I can't say I've anything particular against them."

"Yes, they eat chickens—except the buzzards, and they're so ugly and filthy. Now, I've a chicken to show you—please don't let Aunt Cindy—she's to be your cook—please don't let her kill him—he's crippled—has something the matter with his foot. He was born that way. Everybody wanted to kill him, but I wouldn't let them. I've had an awful time raising him, but he's all right now."

Marion lifted a box and showed her the lame pet, softly clucking his protest against the disturbance of his rest.

"I'll take good care of him, never fear," said Elsie, with a tremor in her voice.

"And I have a queer little black cat I wanted to show you, but he's gone off somewhere. I'd take him with me—only it's bad luck to move cats. He's awful wild—won't let anybody pet him but me. Mamma says he's an imp of Satan—but I love him. He runs up a tree when anybody else tries to get him. But he climbs right up on my shoulder. I never loved any cat quite as well as this silly, half-wild one. You don't mind black cats, do you?"

"No, dear; I like cats."

"Then I know you'll be good to him."

"Is that all?" asked Elsie, with amused interest.

"No, I've the funniest yellow dog that comes here at night to pick up the scraps and things. He isn't my dog—just a little personal friend of mine—but I like him very much, and always give him something. He's very cute. I think he's a nigger dog."

"A nigger dog? What's that?"

"He belongs to some coloured people, who don't give turn enough to eat. I love him because he's so faithful to his own folks. He comes to see me at night and pretends to love me, but as soon as I feed him he trots back home. When he first came, I laughed till I cried at his antics over a carpet—we had a carpet then. He never saw one before, and barked at the colours and the figures in the pattern. Then he'd lie down and rub his back on it and growl. You won't let anybody hurt him?"

"No. Are there any others?"

"Yes, I 'most forgot. If Sam Ross comes—Sam's an idiot who lives at the poorhouse—if he comes, he'll expect a dinner—my, my, I'm afraid he'll cry when he finds we're not here! But you can send him to the hotel to me. Don't let Aunt Cindy speak rough to him. Aunt Cindy's awfully good to me, but she can't bear Sam. She thinks he brings bad luck."

"How on earth did you meet him?"

"His father was rich. He was a good friend of my Papa's. We came near losing our farm once, because a bank failed. Mr. Ross sent Papa a signed check on his own bank, and told him to write the amount he needed on it, and pay him when he was able. Papa cried over it, and wouldn't use it, and wrote a poem on the back of the check—one of the sweetest of all, I think. In the war Mr. Ross lost his two younger sons, both killed at Gettysburg. His wife died heartbroken, and he only lived a year afterward. He sold his farm for Confederate money and everything was lost. Sam was sent to the poorhouse. He found out somehow that we loved him and comes to see us. He's as harmless as a kitten, and works in the garden beautifully."

"I'll remember," Elsie promised.

"And one thing more," she said hesitatingly. "Mamma asked me to speak to you of this—that's why she slipped away. There one little room we have locked. It was Papa's study just as he left it, with his papers scattered on the desk, the books and pictures that he loved—you won't mind?"

Elsie slipped her arm about Marion, looked into the blue eyes, dim with tears, drew her close and said:

"It shall be sacred, my child. You must come every day if possible, and help me."

"I will. I've so many beautiful places to show you in the woods—places he loved, and taught us to see and love. They won't let me go in the woods any more alone. But you have a big brother. That must be very sweet."