"Mistah Speaker!" he bawled.

"Orda da!" yelled another.

"Knock 'im in de head!"

"Seddown, nigger!"

The Speaker pointed his gavel at Aleck and threatened him laughingly:

"Ef de gemman from Ulster doan set down I gwine call 'im ter orda!"

Uncle Aleck greeted this threat with a wild guffaw, which the whole House about him joined in heartily. They laughed like so many hens cackling—when one started the others would follow.

The most of them were munching peanuts, and the crush of hulls under heavy feet added a subnote to the confusion like the crackle of a prairie fire.

The ambition of each negro seemed to be to speak at least a half-dozen times on each question, saying the same thing every time.

No man was allowed to talk five minutes without an interruption which brought on another and another until the speaker was drowned in a storm of contending yells. Their struggles to get the floor with bawlings, bellowings, and contortions, and the senseless rap of the Speaker's gavel, were something appalling.

On this scene, through fetid smoke and animal roar, looked down from the walls, in marble bas-relief, the still white faces of Robert Hayne and George McDuffie, through whose veins flowed the blood of Scottish kings, while over it brooded in solemn wonder the face of John Laurens, whose diplomatic genius at the court of France won millions of gold for our tottering cause, and sent a French fleet and army into the Chesapeake to entrap Cornwallis at Yorktown.

The little group of twenty-three white men, the descendants of these spirits, to whom Dr. Cameron had brought his memorial, presented a pathetic spectacle. Most of them were old men, who sat in grim silence with nothing to do or say as they watched the rising black tide, their dignity, reserve, and decorum at once the wonder and the shame of the modern world.

At least they knew that the minstrel farce being enacted on that floor was a tragedy as deep and dark as was ever woven of the blood and tears of a conquered people. Beneath those loud guffaws they could hear the death rattle in the throat of their beloved State, barbarism strangling civilization by brute force.

For all the stupid uproar, the black leaders of this mob knew what they wanted. One of them was speaking now, the leader of the House, the Honourable Napoleon Whipper.

Dr. Cameron had taken his seat in the little group of white members in one corner of the chamber, beside an old friend from an adjoining county whom he had known in better days.

"Now listen," said his friend. "When Whipper talks he always says something."

"Mr. Speaker, I move you, sir, in view of the arduous duties which our presiding officer has performed this week for the State, that he be allowed one thousand dollars extra pay."

The motion was put without debate and carried.

The Speaker then called Whipper to the Chair and made the same motion, to give the Leader of the House an extra thousand dollars for the performance of his heavy duties.

It was carried.

"What does that mean?" asked the doctor.

"Very simple; Whipper and the Speaker adjourned the House yesterday afternoon to attend a horse race. They lost a thousand dollars each betting on the wrong horse. They are recuperating after the strain. They are booked for judges of the Supreme Court when they finish this job. The negro mass-meeting to-night is to indorse their names for the Supreme Bench."

"Is it possible!" the doctor exclaimed.

When Whipper resumed his place at his desk, the introduction of bills began. One after another were sent to the Speaker's desk, a measure to disarm the whites and equip with modern rifles a negro militia of 80,000 men; to make the uniform of Confederate gray the garb of convicts in South Carolina, with a sign of the rank to signify the degree of crime; to prevent any person calling another a "nigger"; to require men to remove their hats in the presence of all officers, civil or military, and all disfranchised men to remove their hats in the presence of voters; to force black and whites to attend the same schools and open the State University to negroes; to permit the intermarriage of whites and blacks; and to inforce social equality.

Whipper made a brief speech on the last measure:

"Before I am through, I mean that it shall be known that Napoleon Whipper is as good as any man in South Carolina. Don't tell me that I am not on an equality with any man God ever made."

Dr. Cameron turned pale, and trembling with excitement, asked his friend:

"Can that man pass such measures, and the Governor sign them?"

"He can pass anything he wishes. The Governor is his creature—a dirty little scallawag who tore the Union flag from Fort Sumter, trampled it in the dust, and helped raise the flag of Confederacy over it. Now he is backed by the Government at Washington. He won his election by dancing at negro balls and the purchase of delegates. His salary as Governor is $3,500 a year, and he spends over $40,000. Comment is unnecessary. This Legislature has stolen millions of dollars, and already bankrupted the treasury. The day Howle was elected to the Senate of the United States every negro on the floor had his roll of bills and some of them counted it out on their desks. In your day the annual cost of the State government was $400,000. This year it is $2,000,000. These thieves steal daily. They don't deny it. They simply dare you to prove it. The writing paper on the desks cost $16,000. These clocks on the wall $600 each, and every little Radical newspaper in the State has been subsidized in sums varying from $1,000 to $7,000. Each member is allowed to draw for mileage, per diem, and 'sundries.' God only knows what the bill for 'sundries' will aggregate by the end of the session."

"I couldn't conceive of this!" exclaimed the doctor.

"I've only given you a hint. We are a conquered race. The iron hand of Fate is on us. We can only wait for the shadows to deepen into night. President Grant appears to be a babe in the woods. Schuyler Colfax, the Vice-president, and Belknap, the Secretary of War, are in the saddle in Washington. I hear things are happening there that are quite interesting. Besides, Congress now can give little relief. The real lawmaking power in America is the State Legislature. The State lawmaker enters into the holy of holies of our daily life. Once more we are a sovereign State—a sovereign negro State."

"I fear my mission is futile," said the doctor.

"It's ridiculous—I'll call for you to-night and take you to hear Lynch, our Lieutenant-Governor. He is a remarkable man. Our negro Supreme Court Judge will preside—"

Uncle Aleck, who had suddenly spied Dr. Cameron, broke in with a laughing welcome:

"I 'clar ter goodness, Dr. Cammun, I didn't know you wuz here, sah. I sho' glad ter see you. I axes yer ter come across de street ter my room; I got sumfin' pow'ful pertickler ter say ter you."

The doctor followed Aleck out of the hall and across the street to his room in a little boarding-house. His door was locked, and the windows darkened by blinds. Instead of opening the blinds he lighted a lamp.

"Ob cose, Dr. Cammun, you say nuffin 'bout what I gwine tell you?"

"Certainly not, Aleck."

The room was full of drygoods boxes. The space under the bed was packed, and they were piled to the ceiling around the walls.

"Why, what's all this, Aleck?"

The member from Ulster chuckled:

"Dr. Cammun, yu'se been er pow'ful frien' ter me—gimme medicine lots er times, en I hain't nebber paid you nuttin'. I'se sho' come inter de kingdom now, en I wants ter pay my respects ter you, sah. Des look ober dat paper, en mark what you wants, en I hab 'em sont home fur you."

The member from Ulster handed his physician a printed list of more than five hundred articles of merchandise. The doctor read it over with amazement.

"I don't understand it, Aleck. Do you own a store?"

"Na-sah, but we git all we wants fum mos' eny ob 'em. Dem's 'sundries,' sah, dat de Gubment gibs de members. We des orda what we needs. No trouble 'tall, sah. De men what got de goods come roun' en beg us ter take 'em."

The doctor smiled in spite of the tragedy back of the joke.

"Let's see some of the goods, Aleck—are they first class?"

"Yessah; de bes' goin'. I show you."

He pulled out a number of boxes and bundles, exhibiting carpets, door mats, hassocks, dog collars, cow bells, oilcloths, velvets, mosquito nets, damask, Irish linen, billiard outfits, towels, blankets, flannels, quilts, women's hoods, hats, ribbons, pins, needles, scissors, dumb bells, skates, crape skirt braids, tooth brushes, face powder, hooks and eyes, skirts, bustles, chignons, garters, artificial busts, chemises, parasols, watches, jewellery, diamond earrings, ivory-handled knives and forks, pistols and guns, and a Webster's Dictionary.

"Got lots mo' in dem boxes nailed up dar—yessah, hit's no use er lettin' good tings go by yer when you kin des put out yer han' en stop 'em! Some er de members ordered horses en carriages, but I tuk er par er fine mules wid harness en two buggies an er wagin. Dey 'roun at de libry stable, sah."

The doctor thanked Aleck for his friendly feeling, but told him it was, of course, impossible for him at this time, being only a taxpayer and neither a voter nor a member of the Legislature, to share in his supply of "sundries."

He went to the warehouse that night with his friend to hear Lynch, wondering if his mind were capable of receiving another shock.

This meeting had been called to indorse the candidacy, for Justice of the Supreme Court, of Napoleon Whipper, the Leader of the House, the notorious negro thief and gambler, and of William Pitt Moses, an ex-convict, his confederate in crime. They had been unanimously chosen for the positions by a secret caucus of the ninety-four negro members of the House. This addition to the Court, with the negro already a member, would give a majority to the black man on the last Tribunal of Appeal.

The few white men of the party who had any sense of decency were in open revolt at this atrocity. But their influence was on the wane. The carpet-bagger shaped the first Convention and got the first plums of office. Now the negro was in the saddle, and he meant to stay. There were not enough white men in the Legislature to force a roll-call on a division of the House. This meeting was an open defiance of all pale-faces inside or outside party lines.

Every inch of space in the big cotton warehouse was jammed—a black living cloud, pungent and piercing.

The distinguished Lieutenant-Governor, Silas Lynch, had not yet arrived, but the negro Justice of the Supreme Court, Pinchback, was in his seat as the presiding officer.

Dr. Cameron watched the movements of the black judge, already notorious for the sale of his opinions, with a sense of sickening horror. This man was but yesterday a slave, his father a medicine man in an African jungle who decided the guilt or innocence of the accused by the test of administering poison. If the poison killed the man, he was guilty; if he survived, he was innocent. For four thousand years his land had stood a solid bulwark of unbroken barbarism. Out of its darkness he had been thrust upon the seat of judgment of the laws of the proudest and highest type of man evolved in time. It seemed a hideous dream.

His thoughts were interrupted by a shout. It came spontaneous and tremendous in its genuine feeling. The magnificent figure of Lynch, their idol, appeared walking down the aisle escorted by the little scallawag who was the Governor.

He took his seat on the platform with the easy assurance of conscious power. His broad shoulders, superb head, and gleaming jungle eyes held every man in the audience before he had spoken a word.

In the first masterful tones of his voice the doctor's keen intelligence caught the ring of his savage metal and felt the shock of his powerful personality—a personality which had thrown to the winds every mask, whose sole aim of life was sensual, whose only fears were of physical pain and death, who could worship a snake and sacrifice a human being.

His playful introduction showed him a child of Mystery, moved by Voices and inspired by a Fetish. His face was full of good humour, and his whole figure rippled with sleek animal vivacity. For the moment, life was a comedy and a masquerade teeming with whims, fancies, ecstasies and superstitions.

He held the surging crowd in the hollow of his hand. They yelled, laughed, howled, or wept as he willed.

Now he painted in burning words the imaginary horrors of slavery until the tears rolled down his cheeks and he wept at the sound of his own voice. Every dusky hearer burst into tears and moans.

He stopped, suddenly brushed the tears from his eyes, sprang to the edge of the platform, threw both arms above his head and shouted:

"Hosannah to the Lord God Almighty for Emancipation!"

Instantly five thousand negroes, as one man, were on their feet, shouting and screaming. Their shouts rose in unison, swelled into a thunder peal, and died away as one voice.

Dead silence followed, and every eye was again riveted on Lynch. For two hours the doctor sat transfixed, listening and watching him sway the vast audience with hypnotic power.

There was not one note of hesitation or of doubt. It was the challenge of race against race to mortal combat. His closing words again swept every negro from his seat and melted every voice into a single frenzied shout:

"Within five years," he cried, "the intelligence and the wealth of this mighty State will be transferred to the negro race. Lift up your heads. The world is yours. Take it. Here and now I serve notice on every white man who breathes that I am as good as he is. I demand, and I am going to have, the privilege of going to see him in his house or his hotel, eating with him and sleeping with him, and when I see fit, to take his daughter in marriage!"

As the doctor emerged from the stifling crowd with his friend, he drew a deep breath of fresh air, took from his pocket his conservative memorial, picked it into little bits, and scattered them along the street as he walked in silence back to his hotel.



CHAPTER IX

AT LOVER'S LEAP

In spite of the pitiful collapse of old Stoneman under his stroke of paralysis, his children still saw the unconquered soul shining in his colourless eyes. They had both been on the point of confessing their love affairs to him and joining in the inevitable struggle when he was stricken. They knew only too well that he would not consent to a dual alliance with the Camerons under the conditions of fierce hatreds and violence into which the State had drifted. They were too high-minded to consider a violation of his wishes while thus helpless, with his strange eyes following them about in childlike eagerness. His weakness was mightier than his iron will.

So, for eighteen months, while he slowly groped out of mental twilight, each had waited—Elsie with a tender faith struggling with despair, and Phil in a torture of uncertainty and fear.

In the meantime, the young Northerner had become as radical in his sympathies with the Southern people as his father had ever been against them. This power of assimilation has always been a mark of Southern genius. The sight of the Black Hand on their throats now roused his righteous indignation. The patience with which they endured was to him amazing. The Southerner he had found to be the last man on earth to become a revolutionist. All his traits were against it. His genius for command, the deep sense of duty and honour, his hospitality, his deathless love of home, his supreme constancy and sense of civic unity, all combined to make him ultraconservative. He began now to see that it was reverence for authority as expressed in the Constitution under which slavery was established which made Secession inevitable.

Besides, the laziness and incapacity of the negro had been more than he could endure. With no ties of tradition or habits of life to bind him, he simply refused to tolerate them. In this feeling Elsie had grown early to sympathize. She discharged Aunt Cindy for feeding her children from the kitchen, and brought a cook and house girl from the North, while Phil would employ only white men in any capacity.

In the desolation of negro rule the Cameron farm had become worthless. The taxes had more than absorbed the income, and the place was only kept from execution by the indomitable energy of Mrs. Cameron, who made the hotel pay enough to carry the interest on a mortgage which was increasing from season to season.

The doctor's practice was with him a divine calling. He never sent bills to his patients. They paid something if they had it. Now they had nothing.

Ben's law practice was large for his age and experience, but his clients had no money.

While the Camerons were growing each day poorer, Phil was becoming rich. His genius, skill, and enterprise had been quick to see the possibilities of the waterpower. The old Eagle cotton mills had been burned during the war. Phil organized the Eagle & Phoenix Company, interested Northern capitalists, bought the falls, and erected two great mills, the dim hum of whose spindles added a new note to the river's music. Eager, swift, modest, his head full of ideas, his heart full of faith, he had pressed forward to success.

As the old Commoner's mind began to clear, and his recovery was sure, Phil determined to press his suit for Margaret's hand to an issue.

Ben had dropped a hint of an interview of the Rev. Hugh McAlpin with Dr. Cameron, which had thrown Phil into a cold sweat.

He hurried to the hotel to ask Margaret to drive with him that afternoon. He would stop at Lover's Leap and settle the question.

He met the preacher, just emerging from the door, calm, handsome, serious, and Margaret by his side. The dark-haired beauty seemed strangely serene. What could it mean? His heart was in his throat. Was he too late? Wreathed in smiles when the preacher had gone, the girl's face was a riddle he could not solve.

To his joy, she consented to go.

As he left in his trim little buggy for the hotel, he stooped and kissed Elsie, whispering:

"Make an offering on the altar of love for me, Sis!"

"You're too slow. The prayers of all the saints will not save you!" she replied with a laugh, throwing him a kiss as he disappeared in the dust.

As they drove through the great forest on the cliffs overlooking the river, the Southern world seemed lit with new splendours to-day for the Northerner. His heart beat with a strange courage. The odour of the pines, their sighing music, the subtone of the falls below, the subtle life-giving perfume of the fullness of summer, the splendour of the sun gleaming through the deep foliage, and the sweet sensuous air, all seemed incarnate in the calm, lovely face and gracious figure beside him.

They took their seat on the old rustic built against the beech, which was the last tree on the brink of the cliff. A hundred feet below flowed the river, rippling softly along a narrow strip of sand which its current had thrown against the rocks. The ledge of towering granite formed a cave eighty feet in depth at the water's edge. From this projecting wall, tradition said a young Indian princess once leaped with her lover, fleeing from the wrath of a cruel father who had separated them. The cave below was inaccessible from above, being reached by a narrow footpath along the river's edge when entered a mile downstream.

The view from the seat, under the beech, was one of marvellous beauty. For miles the broad river rolled in calm, shining glory seaward, its banks fringed with cane and trees, while fields of corn and cotton spread in waving green toward the distant hills and blue mountains of the west.

Every tree on this cliff was cut with the initials of generations of lovers from Piedmont.

They sat in silence for awhile, Margaret idly playing with a flower she had picked by the pathway, and Phil watching her devoutly. The Southern sun had tinged her face the reddish warm hue of ripened fruit, doubly radiant by contrast with her wealth of dark-brown hair. The lustrous glance of her eyes, half veiled by their long lashes, and the graceful, careless pose of her stately figure held him enraptured. Her dress of airy, azure blue, so becoming to her dark beauty, gave Phil the impression of eiderdown feathers of some rare bird of the tropics. He felt that if he dared to touch her she might lift her wings and sail over the cliff into the sky and forget to light again at his side.

"I am going to ask a very bold and impertinent question, Miss Margaret," Phil said with resolution. "May I?"

Margaret smiled incredulously.

"I'll risk your impertinence, and decide as to its boldness."

"Tell me, please, what that preacher said to you to-day."

Margaret looked away, unable to suppress the merriment that played about her eyes and mouth.

"Will you never breathe it to a soul if I do?"

"Never."

"Honest Injun, here on the sacred altar of the princess?"

"On my honour."

"Then I'll tell you," she said, biting her lips to keep back a laugh. "Mr. McAlpin is very handsome and eloquent. I have always thought him the best preacher we have ever had in Piedmont——"

"Yes, I know," Phil interrupted with a frown. "He is very pious," she went on evenly, "and seeks Divine guidance in prayer in everything he does. He called this morning to see me, and I was playing for him in the little music-room off the parlour, when he suddenly closed the door and said:

"'Miss Margaret, I am going to take, this morning, the most important step of my life——'

"Of course I hadn't the remotest idea what he meant——

"'Will you join me in a word of prayer?' he asked, and knelt right down. I was accustomed, of course, to kneel with him in family worship at his pastoral calls, and so from habit I slipped to one knee by the piano stool, wondering what on earth he was about. When he prayed with fervour for the Lord to bless the great love with which he hoped to hallow my life—I giggled. It broke up the meeting. He rose and asked me to marry him. I told him the Lord hadn't revealed it to me——"

Phil seized her hand and held it firmly. The smile died from the girl's face, her hand trembled, and the rose tint on her cheeks flamed to scarlet.

"Margaret, my own, I love you," he cried with joy. "You could have told that story only to the one man whom you love—is it not true?"

"Yes. I've loved you always," said the low, sweet voice.

"Always?" asked Phil through a tear.

"Before I saw you, when they told me you were as Ben's twin brother, my heart began to sing at the sound of your name——"

"Call it," he whispered.

"Phil, my sweetheart!" she said with a laugh.

"How tender and homelike the music of your voice! The world has never seen the match of your gracious Southern womanhood! Snowbound in the North, I dreamed, as a child, of this world of eternal sunshine. And now every memory and dream I've found in you."

"And you won't be disappointed in my simple ideal that finds its all within a home?"

"No. I love the old-fashioned dream of the South. Maybe you have enchanted me, but I love these green hills and mountains, these rivers musical with cascade and fall, these solemn forests—but for the Black Curse, the South would be to-day the garden of the world!"

"And you will help our people lift this curse?" softly asked the girl, nestling closer to his side.

"Yes, dearest, thy people shall be mine! Had I a thousand wrongs to cherish, I'd forgive them all for your sake. I'll help you build here a new South on all that's good and noble in the old, until its dead fields blossom again, its harbours bristle with ships, and the hum of a thousand industries make music in every valley. I'd sing to you in burning verse if I could, but it is not my way. I have been awkward and slow in love, perhaps—but I'll be swift in your service. I dream to make dead stones and wood live and breathe for you, of victories wrung from Nature that are yours. My poems will be deeds, my flowers the hard-earned wealth that has a soul, which I shall lay at your feet."

"Who said my lover was dumb?" she sighed, with a twinkle in her shining eyes. "You must introduce me to your father soon. He must like me as my father does you, or our dream can never come true."

A pain gripped Phil's heart, but he answered bravely:

"I will. He can't help loving you."

They stood on the rustic seat to carve their initials within a circle, high on the old beechwood book of love.

"May I write it out in full—Margaret Cameron—Philip Stoneman?" he asked.

"No—only the initials now—the full names when you've seen my father and I've seen yours. Jeannie Campbell and Henry Lenoir were once written thus in full, and many a lover has looked at that circle and prayed for happiness like theirs. You can see there a new one cut over the old, the bark has filled, and written on the fresh page is 'Marion Lenoir' with the blank below for her lover's name."

Phil looked at the freshly cut circle and laughed:

"I wonder if Marion or her mother did that?"

"Her mother, of course."

"I wonder whose will be the lucky name some day within it?" said Phil musingly as he finished his own.



CHAPTER X

A NIGHT HAWK

When the old Commoner's private physician had gone and his mind had fully cleared, he would sit for hours in the sunshine of the vine-clad porch, asking Elsie of the village, its life, and its people. He smiled good-naturedly at her eager sympathy for their sufferings as at the enthusiasm of a child who could not understand. He had come possessed by a great idea—events must submit to it. Her assurance that the poverty and losses of the people were far in excess of the worst they had known during the war was too absurd even to secure his attention.

He had refused to know any of the people, ignoring the existence of Elsie's callers. But he had fallen in love with Marion from the moment he had seen her. The cold eye of the old fox hunter kindled with the fire of his forgotten youth at the sight of this beautiful girl seated on the glistening back of the mare she had saved from death.

As she rode through the village every boy lifted his hat as to passing royalty, and no one, old or young, could allow her to pass without a cry of admiration. Her exquisite figure had developed into the full tropic splendour of Southern girlhood.

She had rejected three proposals from ardent lovers, on one of whom her mother had quite set her heart. A great fear had grown in Mrs. Lenoir's mind lest she were in love with Ben Cameron. She slipped her arm around her one day and timidly asked her.

A faint flush tinged Marion's face up to the roots of her delicate blonde hair, and she answered with a quick laugh:

"Mamma, how silly you are! You know I've always been in love with Ben—since I can first remember. I know he is in love with Elsie Stoneman. I am too young, the world too beautiful, and life too sweet to grieve over my first baby love. I expect to dance with him at his wedding, then meet my fate and build my own nest."

Old Stoneman begged that she come every day to see him. He never tired praising her to Elsie. As she walked gracefully up to the house one afternoon, holding Hugh by the hand, he said to Elsie:

"Next to you, my dear, she is the most charming creature I ever saw. Her tenderness for everything that needs help touches the heart of an old lame man in a very soft spot."

"I've never seen any one who could resist her," Elsie answered. "Her gloves may be worn, her feet clad in old shoes, yet she is always neat, graceful, dainty, and serene. No wonder her mother worships her."

Sam Ross, her simple friend, had stopped at the gate, and looked over into the lawn as if afraid to come in.

When Marion saw Sam, she turned back to the gate to invite him in. The keeper of the poor, a vicious-looking negro, suddenly confronted him, and he shrank in terror close to the girl's side.

"What you doin' here, sah?" the black keeper railed. "Ain't I done tole you 'bout runnin' away?"

"You let him alone," Marion cried.

The negro pushed her roughly from his side and knocked Sam down. The girl screamed for help, and old Stoneman hobbled down the steps, following Elsie.

When they reached the gate, Marion was bending over the prostrate form.

"Oh, my, my, I believe he's killed him!" she wailed.

"Run for the doctor, sonny, quick," Stoneman said to Hugh. The boy darted away and brought Dr. Cameron.

"How dare you strike that man, you devil?" thundered the old statesman.

"'Case I tole 'im ter stay home en do de wuk I put 'im at, en he all de time runnin' off here ter git somfin' ter eat. I gwine frail de life outen 'im, ef he doan min' me."

"Well, you make tracks back to the Poorhouse. I'll attend to this man, and I'll have you arrested for this before night," said Stoneman, with a scowl.

The black keeper laughed as he left.

"Not 'less you'se er bigger man dan Gubner Silas Lynch, you won't!"

When Dr. Cameron had restored Sam, and dressed the wound on his head where he had struck a stone in falling, Stoneman insisted that the boy be put to bed.

Turning to Dr. Cameron, he asked:

"Why should they put a brute like this in charge of the poor?"

"That's a large question, sir, at this time," said the doctor politely, "and now that you have asked it, I have some things I've been longing for an opportunity to say to you."

"Be seated, sir," the old Commoner answered, "I shall be glad to hear them."

Elsie's heart leaped with joy over the possible outcome of this appeal, and she left the room with a smile for the doctor.

"First, allow me," said the Southerner pleasantly, "to express my sorrow at your long illness, and my pleasure at seeing you so well. Your children have won the love of all our people and have had our deepest sympathy in your illness."

Stoneman muttered an inaudible reply, and the doctor went on:

"Your question brings up, at once, the problem of the misery and degradation into which our country has sunk under negro rule——"

Stoneman smiled coldly and interrupted:

"Of course, you understand my position in politics, Doctor Cameron—I am a Radical Republican."

"So much the better," was the response. "I have been longing for months to get your ear. Your word will be all the more powerful if raised in our behalf. The negro is the master of our State, county, city, and town governments. Every school, college, hospital, asylum, and poorhouse is his prey. What you have seen is but a sample. Negro insolence grows beyond endurance. Their women are taught to insult their old mistresses and mock their poverty as they pass in their old, faded dresses. Yesterday a black driver struck a white child of six with his whip, and when the mother protested, she was arrested by a negro policeman, taken before a negro magistrate, and fined $10 for 'insulting a freedman.'"

Stoneman frowned: "Such things must be very exceptional."

"They are everyday occurrences and cease to excite comment. Lynch, the Lieutenant-Governor, who has bought a summer home here, is urging this campaign of insult with deliberate purpose——"

The old man shook his head. "I can't think the Lieutenant-Governor guilty of such petty villainy."

"Our school commissioner," the doctor continued, "is a negro who can neither read nor write. The black grand jury last week discharged a negro for stealing cattle and indicted the owner for false imprisonment. No such rate of taxation was ever imposed on a civilized people. A tithe of it cost Great Britain her colonies. There are 5,000 homes in this county—2,900 of them are advertised for sale by the sheriff to meet his tax bills. This house will be sold next court day——"

Stoneman looked up sharply. "Sold for taxes?"

"Yes; with the farm which has always been Mrs. Lenoir's support. In part her loss came from the cotton tax. Congress, in addition to the desolation of war, and the ruin of black rule, has wrung from the cotton farmers of the South a tax of $67,000,000. Every dollar of this money bears the stain of the blood of starving people. They are ready to give up, or to spring some desperate scheme of resistance——"

The old man lifted his massive head and his great jaws came together with a snap:

"Resistance to the authority of the National Government?"

"No; resistance to the travesty of government and the mockery of civilization under which we are being throttled! The bayonet is now in the hands of a brutal negro militia. The tyranny of military martinets was child's play to this. As I answered your call this morning I was stopped and turned back in the street by the drill of a company of negroes under the command of a vicious scoundrel named Gus who was my former slave. He is the captain of this company. Eighty thousand armed negro troops, answerable to no authority save the savage instincts of their officers, terrorize the State. Every white company has been disarmed and disbanded by our scallawag Governor. I tell you, sir, we are walking on the crust of a volcano——"

Old Stoneman scowled as the doctor rose and walked nervously to the window and back.

"An appeal from you to the conscience of the North might save us," he went on eagerly. "Black hordes of former slaves, with the intelligence of children and the instincts of savages, armed with modern rifles, parade daily in front of their unarmed former masters. A white man has no right a negro need respect. The children of the breed of men who speak the tongue of Burns and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh, have been disarmed and made subject to the black spawn of an African jungle! Can human flesh endure it? When Goth and Vandal barbarians overran Rome, the negro was the slave of the Roman Empire. The savages of the North blew out the light of Ancient Civilization, but in all the dark ages which followed they never dreamed the leprous infamy of raising a black slave to rule over his former master! No people in the history of the world have ever before been so basely betrayed, so wantonly humiliated and degraded!"

Stoneman lifted his head in amazement at the burst of passionate intensity with which the Southerner poured out his protest.

"For a Russian to rule a Pole," he went on, "a Turk to rule a Greek, or an Austrian to dominate an Italian is hard enough, but for a thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odour, to shout in derision over the hearths and homes of white men and women is an atrocity too monstrous for belief. Our people are yet dazed by its horror. My God! when they realize its meaning, whose arm will be strong enough to hold them?"

"I should think the South was sufficiently amused with resistance to authority," interrupted Stoneman.

"Even so. Yet there is a moral force at the bottom of every living race of men. The sense of right, the feeling of racial destiny—these are unconquered and unconquerable forces. Every man in South Carolina to-day is glad that slavery is dead. The war was not too great a price for us to pay for the lifting of its curse. And now to ask a Southerner to be the slave of a slave——"

"And yet, Doctor," said Stoneman coolly, "manhood suffrage is the one eternal thing fixed in the nature of Democracy. It is inevitable."

"At the price of racial life? Never!" said the Southerner, with fiery emphasis. "This Republic is great, not by reason of the amount of dirt we possess, the size of our census roll, or our voting register—we are great because of the genius of the race of pioneer white freemen who settled this continent, dared the might of kings, and made a wilderness the home of Freedom. Our future depends on the purity of this racial stock. The grant of the ballot to these millions of semi-savages and the riot of debauchery which has followed are crimes against human progress."

"Yet may we not train him?" asked Stoneman.

"To a point, yes, and then sink to his level if you walk as his equal in physical contact with him. His race is not an infant; it is a degenerate—older than yours in time. At last we are face to face with the man whom slavery concealed with its rags. Suffrage is but the new paper cloak with which the Demagogue has sought to hide the issue. Can we assimilate the negro? The very question is pollution. In Hayti no white man can own land. Black dukes and marquises drive over them and swear at them for getting under their wheels. Is civilization a patent cloak with which law-tinkers can wrap an animal and make him a king?"

"But the negro must be protected by the ballot," protested the statesman. "The humblest man must have the opportunity to rise. The real issue is Democracy."

"The issue, sir, is Civilization! Not whether a negro shall be protected, but whether Society is worth saving from barbarism."

"The statesman can educate," put in the Commoner.

The doctor cleared his throat with a quick little nervous cough he was in the habit of giving when deeply moved.

"Education, sir, is the development of that which is. Since the dawn of history the negro has owned the continent of Africa—rich beyond the dream of poet's fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear, or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail! He lived as his fathers lived—stole his food, worked his wife, sold his children, ate his brother, content to drink, sing, dance, and sport as the ape!

"And this creature, half child, half animal, the sport of impulse, whim, and conceit, 'pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw,' a being who, left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose speech knows no word of love, whose passions, once aroused, are as the fury of the tiger—they have set this thing to rule over the Southern people——"

The doctor sprang to his feet, his face livid, his eyes blazing with emotion. "Merciful God—it surpasses human belief!"

He sank exhausted in his chair, and, extending his hand in an eloquent gesture, continued:

"Surely, surely, sir, the people of the North are not mad? We can yet appeal to the conscience and the brain of our brethren of a common race?"

Stoneman was silent as if stunned. Deep down in his strange soul he was drunk with the joy of a triumphant vengeance he had carried locked in the depths of his being, yet the intensity of this man's suffering for a people's cause surprised and distressed him as all individual pain hurt him.

Dr. Cameron rose, stung by his silence and the consciousness of the hostility with which Stoneman had wrapped himself.

"Pardon my apparent rudeness, Doctor," he said at length, extending his hand. "The violence of your feeling stunned me for the moment. I'm obliged to you for speaking. I like a plain-spoken man. I am sorry to learn of the stupidity of the former military commandant in this town——"

"My personal wrongs, sir," the doctor broke in, "are nothing!"

"I am sorry, too, about these individual cases of suffering. They are the necessary incidents of a great upheaval. But may it not all come out right in the end? After the Dark Ages, day broke at last. We have the printing press, railroad, and telegraph—a revolution in human affairs. We may do in years what it took ages to do in the past. May not the black man speedily emerge? Who knows? An appeal to the North will be a waste of breath. This experiment is going to be made. It is written in the book of Fate. But I like you. Come to see me again."

Dr. Cameron left with a heavy heart. He had grown a great hope in this long-wished-for appeal to Stoneman. It had come to his ears that the old man, who had dwelt as one dead in their village, was a power.

It was ten o'clock before the doctor walked slowly back to the hotel. As he passed the armoury of the black militia, they were still drilling under the command of Gus. The windows were open, through which came the steady tramp of heavy feet and the cry of "Hep! Hep! Hep!" from the Captain's thick cracked lips. The full-dress officer's uniform, with its gold epaulets, yellow stripes, and glistening sword, only accentuated the coarse bestiality of Gus. His huge jaws seemed to hide completely the gold braid on his collar.

The doctor watched, with a shudder, his black bloated face covered with perspiration and the huge hand gripping his sword.

They suddenly halted in double ranks and Gus yelled:

"Odah, arms!"

The butts of their rifles crashed to the floor with precision, and they were allowed to break ranks for a brief rest.

They sang "John Brown's Body," and as its echoes died away a big negro swung his rifle in a circle over his head, shouting:

"Here's your regulator for white trash! En dey's nine hundred ob 'em in dis county!"

"Yas, Lawd!" howled another.

"We got 'em down now en we keep 'em dar, chile!" bawled another.

The doctor passed on slowly to the hotel. The night was dark, the streets were without lights under their present rulers, and the stars were hidden with swift-flying clouds which threatened a storm. As he passed under the boughs of an oak in front of his house, a voice above him whispered:

"A message for you, sir."

Had the wings of a spirit suddenly brushed his cheek, he would not have been more startled.

"Who are you?" he asked, with a slight tremor.

"A Night Hawk of the Invisible Empire, with a message from the Grand Dragon of the Realm," was the low answer, as he thrust a note in the doctor's hand. "I will wait for your answer."

The doctor fumbled to his office on the corner of the lawn, struck a match, and read:

"A great Scotch-Irish leader of the South from Memphis is here to-night and wishes to see you. If you will meet General Forrest, I will bring him to the hotel in fifteen minutes. Burn this. Ben."

The doctor walked quickly back to the spot where he had heard the voice, and said:

"I'll see him with pleasure."

The invisible messenger wheeled his horse, and in a moment the echo of his muffled hoofs had died away in the distance.



CHAPTER XI

THE BEAT OF A SPARROW'S WING

Dr. Cameron's appeal had left the old Commoner unshaken in his idea. There could be but one side to any question with such a man, and that was his side. He would stand by his own men, too. He believed in his own forces. The bayonet was essential to his revolutionary programme—hence the hand which held it could do no wrong. Wrongs were accidents which might occur under any system.

Yet in no way did he display the strange contradictions of his character so plainly as in his inability to hate the individual who stood for the idea he was fighting with maniac fury. He liked Dr. Cameron instantly, though he had come to do a crime that would send him into beggared exile.

Individual suffering he could not endure. In this the doctor's appeal had startling results.

He sent for Mrs. Lenoir and Marion.

"I understand, Madam," he said gravely, "that your house and farm are to be sold for taxes."

"Yes, sir; we've given it up this time. Nothing can be done," was the hopeless answer.

"Would you consider an offer of twenty dollars an acre?"

"Nobody would be fool enough to offer it. You can buy all the land in the county for a dollar an acre. It's not worth anything."

"I disagree with you," said Stoneman cheerfully. "I am looking far ahead. I would like to make an experiment here with Pennsylvania methods on this land. I'll give you ten thousand dollars cash for your five hundred acres if you will take it."

"You don't mean it?" Mrs. Lenoir gasped, choking back the tears.

"Certainly. You can at once return to your home. I'll take another house, and invest your money for you in good Northern securities."

The mother burst into sobs, unable to speak, while Marion threw her arms impulsively around the old man's neck and kissed him.

His cold eyes were warmed with the first tear they had shed in years.

He moved the next day to the Ross estate, which he rented, had Sam brought back to the home of his childhood in charge of a good-natured white attendant, and installed in one of the little cottages on the lawn. He ordered Lynch to arrest the keeper of the poor, and hold him on a charge of assault with intent to kill, awaiting the action of the Grand Jury. The Lieutenant-Governor received this order with sullen anger—yet he saw to its execution. He was not quite ready for a break with the man who had made him.

Astonished at his new humour, Phil and Elsie hastened to confess to him their love affairs and ask his approval of their choice. His reply was cautious, yet he did not refuse his consent. He advised them to wait a few months, allow him time to know the young people, and get his bearings on the conditions of Southern society. His mood of tenderness was a startling revelation to them of the depth and intensity of his love.

When Mrs. Lenoir returned with Marion to her vine-clad home, she spent the first day of perfect joy since the death of her lover husband. The deed had not yet been made of the transfer of the farm, but it was only a question of legal formality. She was to receive the money in the form of interest-bearing securities and deliver the title on the following morning.

Arm in arm, mother and daughter visited again each hallowed spot, with the sweet sense of ownership. The place was in perfect order. Its flowers were in gorgeous bloom, its walks clean and neat, the fences painted, and the gates swung on new hinges.

They stood with their arms about one another, watching the sun sink behind the mountains, with tears of gratitude and hope stirring their souls.

Ben Cameron strode through the gate, and they hurried to meet him with cries of joy.

"Just dropped in a minute to see if you are snug for the night," he said.

"Of course, snug and so happy we've been hugging one another for hours," said the mother. "Oh, Ben, the clouds have lifted at last!"

"Has Aunt Cindy come yet?" he asked.

"No, but she'll be here in the morning to get breakfast. We don't want anything to eat," she answered.

"Then I'll come out when I'm through my business to-night, and sleep in the house to keep you company."

"Nonsense," said the mother, "we couldn't think of putting you to the trouble. We've spent many a night here alone."

"But not in the past two years," he said with a frown.

"We're not afraid," Marion said with a smile. "Besides, we'd keep you awake all night with our laughter and foolishness, rummaging through the house."

"You'd better let me," Ben protested.

"No," said the mother, "we'll be happier to-night alone, with only God's eye to see how perfectly silly we can be. Come and take supper with us to-morrow night. Bring Elsie and her guitar—I don't like the banjo—and we'll have a little love feast with music in the moonlight."

"Yes, do that," cried Marion. "I know we owe this good luck to her. I want to tell her how much I love her for it."

"Well, if you insist on staying alone," said Ben reluctantly, "I'll bring Miss Elsie to-morrow, but I don't like your being here without Aunt Cindy to-night."

"Oh, we're all right!" laughed Marion, "but what I want to know is what you are doing out so late every night since you've come home, and where you were gone for the past week?"

"Important business," he answered soberly.

"Business—I expect!" she cried. "Look here, Ben Cameron, have you another girl somewhere you're flirting with?"

"Yes," he answered slowly, coming closer and his voice dropping to a whisper, "and her name is Death."

"Why, Ben!" Marion gasped, placing her trembling hand unconsciously on his arm, a faint flush mantling her cheek and leaving it white.

"What do you mean?" asked the mother in low tones.

"Nothing that I can explain. I only wish to warn you both never to ask me such questions before any one."

"Forgive me," said Marion, with a tremor. "I didn't think it serious."

Ben pressed the little warm hand, watching her mouth quiver with a smile that was half a sigh, as he answered:

"You know I'd trust either of you with my life, but I can't be too careful."

"We'll remember, Sir Knight," said the mother. "Don't forget, then, to-morrow—and spend the evening with us. I wish I had one of Marion's new dresses done. Poor child, she has never had a decent dress in her life before. You know I never look at my pretty baby grown to such a beautiful womanhood without hearing Henry say over and over again—'Beauty is a sign of the soul—the body is the soul!'"

"Well, I've my doubts about your improving her with a fine dress," he replied thoughtfully. "I don't believe that more beautifully dressed women ever walked the earth than our girls of the South who came out of the war clad in the pathos of poverty, smiling bravely through the shadows, bearing themselves as queens though they wore the dress of the shepherdess."

"I'm almost tempted to kiss you for that, as you once took advantage of me!" said Marion, with enthusiasm.

The moon had risen and a whippoorwill was chanting his weird song on the lawn as Ben left them leaning on the gate.

* * * * *

It was past midnight before they finished the last touches in restoring their nest to its old homelike appearance and sat down happy and tired in the room in which Marion was born, brooding and dreaming and talking over the future.

The mother was hanging on the words of her daughter, all the baffled love of the dead poet husband, her griefs and poverty consumed in the glowing joy of new hopes. Her love for this child was now a triumphant passion, which had melted her own being into the object of worship, until the soul of the daughter was superimposed on the mother's as the magnetized by the magnetizer.

"And you'll never keep a secret from me, dear?" she asked Marion.

"Never."

"You'll tell me all your love affairs?" she asked softly, as she drew the shining blonde head down on her shoulder.

"Faithfully."

"You know I've been afraid sometimes you were keeping something back from me, deep down in your heart—and I'm jealous. You didn't refuse Henry Grier because you loved Ben Cameron—now, did you?"

The little head lay still before she answered:



"How many times must I tell you, Silly, that I've loved Ben since I can remember, that I will always love him, and when I meet my fate, at last, I shall boast to my children of my sweet girl romance with the Hero of Piedmont, and they shall laugh and cry with me over——"

"What's that?" whispered the mother, leaping to her feet.

"I heard nothing," Marion answered, listening.

"I thought I heard footsteps on the porch."

"Maybe it's Ben, who decided to come anyhow," said the girl.

"But he'd knock!" whispered the mother.

The door flew open with a crash, and four black brutes leaped into the room, Gus in the lead, with a revolver in his hand, his yellow teeth grinning through his thick lips.

"Scream now, an' I blow yer brains out," he growled.

Blanched with horror, the mother sprang before Marion with a shivering cry:

"What do you want?"

"Not you," said Gus, closing the blinds and handing a rope to another brute. "Tie de ole one ter de bedpost."

The mother screamed. A blow from a black fist in her mouth, and the rope was tied.

With the strength of despair she tore at the cords, half rising to her feet, while with mortal anguish she gasped:

"For God's sake, spare my baby! Do as you will with me, and kill me—do not touch her!"

Again the huge fist swept her to the floor.

Marion staggered against the wall, her face white, her delicate lips trembling with the chill of a fear colder than death.

"We have no money—the deed has not been delivered," she pleaded, a sudden glimmer of hope flashing in her blue eyes.

Gus stepped closer, with an ugly leer, his flat nose dilated, his sinister bead eyes wide apart, gleaming apelike, as he laughed:

"We ain't atter money!"

The girl uttered a cry, long, tremulous, heart-rending, piteous.

A single tiger spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white throat and she was still.



CHAPTER XII

AT THE DAWN OF DAY

It was three o'clock before Marion regained consciousness, crawled to her mother, and crouched in dumb convulsions in her arms.

"What can we do, my darling?" the mother asked at last.

"Die—thank God, we have the strength left!"

"Yes, my love," was the faint answer.

"No one must ever know. We will hide quickly every trace of crime. They will think we strolled to Lover's Leap and fell over the cliff, and my name will always be sweet and clean—you understand—come, we must hurry——"

With swift hands, her blue eyes shining with a strange light, the girl removed the shreds of torn clothes, bathed, and put on the dress of spotless white she wore the night Ben Cameron kissed her and called her a heroine.

The mother cleaned and swept the room, piled the torn clothes and cord in the fireplace and burned them, dressed herself as if for a walk, softly closed the doors, and hurried with her daughter along the old pathway through the moonlit woods.

At the edge of the forest she stopped and looked back tenderly at the little home shining amid the roses, caught their faint perfume and faltered:

"Let's go back a minute—I want to see his room, and kiss Henry's picture again."

"No, we are going to him now—I hear him calling us in the mists above the cliff," said the girl—"come, we must hurry. We might go mad and fail!"

Down the dim cathedral aisles of the woods, hallowed by tender memories, through which the poet lover and father had taught them to walk with reverent feet and without fear, they fled to the old meeting-place of Love.

On the brink of the precipice, the mother trembled, paused, drew back, and gasped:

"Are you not afraid, my dear?"

"No; death is sweet now," said the girl. "I fear only the pity of those we love."

"Is there no other way? We might go among strangers," pleaded the mother.

"We could not escape ourselves! The thought of life is torture. Only those who hate me could wish that I live. The grave will be soft and cool, the light of day a burning shame."

"Come back to the seat a moment—let me tell you my love again," urged the mother. "Life still is dear while I hold your hand."

As they sat in brooding anguish, floating up from the river valley came the music of a banjo in a negro cabin, mingled with vulgar shout and song and dance. A verse of the ribald senseless lay of the player echoed above the banjo's pert refrain:

"Chicken in de bread tray, pickin' up dough; Granny, will your dog bite? No, chile, no!"

The mother shivered and drew Marion closer.

"Oh, dear! oh, dear! has it come to this—all my hopes of your beautiful life!"

The girl lifted her head and kissed the quivering lips.

"With what loving wonder we saw you grow," she sighed, "from a tottering babe on to the hour we watched the mystic light of maidenhood dawn in your blue eyes—and all to end in this hideous, leprous shame. No—No! I will not have it! It's only a horrible dream! God is not dead!"

The young mother sank to her knees and buried her face in Marion's lap in a hopeless paroxysm of grief.

The girl bent, kissed the curling hair, and smoothed it with her soft hand.

A sparrow chirped in the tree above, a wren twittered in a bush, and down on the river's bank a mocking-bird softly waked his mate with a note of thrilling sweetness. "The morning is coming, dearest; we must go," said Marion. "This shame I can never forget, nor will the world forget. Death is the only way."

They walked to the brink, and the mother's arms stole round the girl.

"Oh, my baby, my beautiful darling, life of my life, heart of my heart, soul of my soul!"

They stood for a moment, as if listening to the music of the falls, looking out over the valley faintly outlining itself in the dawn. The first far-away streaks of blue light on the mountain ranges, defining distance, slowly appeared. A fresh motionless day brooded over the world as the amorous stir of the spirit of morning rose from the moist earth of the fields below.

A bright star still shone in the sky, and the face of the mother gazed on it intently. Did the Woman-spirit, the burning focus of the fiercest desire to live and will, catch in this supreme moment the star's Divine speech before which all human passions sink into silence? Perhaps, for she smiled. The daughter answered with a smile; and then, hand in hand, they stepped from the cliff into the mists and on through the opal gates of death.

————————————————————————————————————-

Book IV—The Ku Klux Klan



CHAPTER I

THE HUNT FOR THE ANIMAL

Aunt Cindy came at seven o'clock to get breakfast, and finding the house closed and no one at home, supposed Mrs. Lenoir and Marion had remained at the Cameron House for the night. She sat down on the steps, waited grumblingly an hour, and then hurried to the hotel to scold her former mistress for keeping her out so long.

Accustomed to enter familiarly, she thrust her head into the dining-room, where the family were at breakfast with a solitary guest, muttering the speech she had been rehearsing on the way:

"I lak ter know what sort er way dis—whar's Miss Jeannie?"

Ben leaped to his feet.

"Isn't she at home?"

"Been waitin' dar two hours."

"Great God!" he groaned, springing through the door and rushing to saddle the mare. As he left he called to his father: "Let no one know till I return."

At the house he could find no trace of the crime he had suspected. Every room was in perfect order. He searched the yard carefully and under the cedar by the window he saw the barefoot tracks of a negro. The white man was never born who could make that track. The enormous heel projected backward, and in the hollow of the instep where the dirt would scarcely be touched by an Aryan was the deep wide mark of the African's flat foot. He carefully measured it, brought from an outhouse a box, and fastened it over the spot.

It might have been an ordinary chicken thief, of course. He could not tell, but it was a fact of big import. A sudden hope flashed through his mind that they might have risen with the sun and strolled to their favourite haunt at Lover's Leap.

In two minutes he was there, gazing with hard-set eyes at Marion's hat and handkerchief lying on the shelving rock.

The mare bent her glistening neck, touched the hat with her nose, lifted her head, dilated her delicate nostrils, looked out over the cliff with her great soft half-human eyes and whinnied gently.

Ben leaped to the ground, picked up the handkerchief, and looked at the initials, "M. L.," worked in the corner. He knew what lay on the river's brink below as well as if he stood over the dead bodies. He kissed the letters of her name, crushed the handkerchief in his locked hands, and cried:

"Now, Lord God, give me strength for the service of my people!"

He hurriedly examined the ground, amazed to find no trace of a struggle or crime. Could it be possible they had ventured too near the brink and fallen over?

He hurried to report to his father his discoveries, instructed his mother and Margaret to keep the servants quiet until the truth was known, and the two men returned along the river's brink to the foot of the cliff.

They found the bodies close to the water's edge, Marion had been killed instantly. Her fair blonde head lay in a crimson circle sharply defined in the white sand. But the mother was still warm with life. She had scarcely ceased to breathe. In one last desperate throb of love the trembling soul had dragged the dying body to the girl's side, and she had died with her head resting on the fair round neck as though she had kissed her and fallen asleep.

Father and son clasped hands and stood for a moment with uncovered heads. The doctor said at length:

"Go to the coroner at once and see that he summons the jury you select and hand to him. Bring them immediately. I will examine the bodies before they arrive."

Ben took the negro coroner into his office alone, turned the key, told him of the discovery, and handed him the list of the jury.

"I'll hatter see Mr. Lynch fust, sah," he answered.

Ben placed his hand on his hip pocket and said coldly:

"Put your cross-mark on those forms I've made out there for you, go with me immediately, and summon these men. If you dare put a negro on this jury, or open your mouth as to what has occurred in this room, I'll kill you."

The negro tremblingly did as he was commanded.

The coroner's jury reported that the mother and daughter had been killed by accidentally failing over the cliff.

In all the throng of grief-stricken friends who came to the little cottage that day, but two men knew the hell-lit secret beneath the tragedy.

When the bodies reached the home, Doctor Cameron placed Mrs. Cameron and Margaret outside to receive visitors and prevent any one from disturbing him. He took Ben into the room and locked the doors.

"My boy, I wish you to witness an experiment."

He drew from its case a powerful microscope of French make.

"What on earth are you going to do, sir?"

The doctor's brilliant eyes flashed with a mystic light as he replied:

"Find the fiend who did this crime—and then we will hang him on a gallows so high that all men from the rivers to ends of the earth shall see and feel and know the might of an unconquerable race of men."

"But there's no trace of him here."

"We shall see," said the doctor, adjusting his instrument.

"I believe that a microscope of sufficient power will reveal on the retina of these dead eyes the image of this devil as if etched there by fire. The experiment has been made successfully in France. No word or deed of man is lost. A German scholar has a memory so wonderful he can repeat whole volumes of Latin, German, and French without an error. A Russian officer has been known to repeat the roll-call of any regiment by reading it twice. Psychologists hold that nothing is lost from the memory of man. Impressions remain in the brain like words written on paper in invisible ink. So I believe of images in the eye if we can trace them early enough. If no impression were made subsequently on the mother's eye by the light of day, I believe the fire-etched record of this crime can yet be traced."

Ben watched him with breathless interest.

He first examined Marion's eyes. But in the cold azure blue of their pure depths he could find nothing.

"It's as I feared with the child," he said. "I can see nothing. It is on the mother I rely. In the splendour of life, at thirty-seven she was the full-blown perfection of womanhood, with every vital force at its highest tension——"

He looked long and patiently into the dead mother's eye, rose and wiped the perspiration from his face.

"What is it, sir?" asked Ben.

Without reply, as if in a trance, he returned to the microscope and again rose with the little, quick, nervous cough he gave only in the greatest excitement, and whispered:

"Look now and tell me what you see."

Ben looked and said:

"I can see nothing."

"Your powers of vision are not trained as mine," replied the doctor, resuming his place at the instrument.

"What do you see?" asked the younger man, bending nervously.

"The bestial figure of a negro—his huge black hand plainly defined—the upper part of the face is dim, as if obscured by a gray mist of dawn—but the massive jaws and lips are clear—merciful God—yes—it's Gus!"

The doctor leaped to his feet livid with excitement.

Ben bent again, looked long and eagerly, but could see nothing.

"I'm afraid the image is in your eye, sir, not the mother's," said Ben sadly.

"That's possible, of course," said the doctor, "yet I don't believe it."

"I've thought of the same scoundrel and tried blood hounds on that track, but for some reason they couldn't follow it. I suspected him from the first, and especially since learning that he left for Columbia on the early morning train on pretended official business."

"Then I'm not mistaken," insisted the doctor, trembling with excitement. "Now do as I tell you. Find when he returns. Capture him, bind, gag, and carry him to your meeting-place under the cliff, and let me know."

On the afternoon of the funeral, two days later, Ben received a cypher telegram from the conductor on the train telling him that Gus was on the evening mail due at Piedmont at nine o'clock.

The papers had been filled with accounts of the accident, and an enormous crowd from the county and many admirers of the fiery lyrics of the poet father had come from distant parts to honour his name. All business was suspended, and the entire white population of the village followed the bodies to their last resting-place.

As the crowds returned to their homes, no notice was taken of a dozen men on horseback who rode out of town by different ways about dusk. At eight o'clock they met in the woods near the first little flag-station located on McAllister's farm four miles from Piedmont, where a buggy awaited them. Two men of powerful build, who were strangers in the county, alighted from the buggy and walked along the track to board the train at the station three miles beyond and confer with the conductor.

The men, who gathered in the woods, dismounted, removed their saddles, and from the folds of the blankets took a white disguise for horse and man. In a moment it was fitted on each horse, with buckles at the throat, breast, and tail, and the saddles replaced. The white robe for the man was made in the form of an ulster overcoat with cape, the skirt extending to the top of the shoes. From the red belt at the waist were swung two revolvers which had been concealed in their pockets. On each man's breast was a scarlet circle within which shone a white cross. The same scarlet circle and cross appeared on the horse's breast, while on his flanks flamed the three red mystic letters, K. K. K. Each man wore a white cap, from the edges of which fell a piece of cloth extending to the shoulders. Beneath the visor was an opening for the eyes and lower down one for the mouth. On the front of the caps of two of the men appeared the red wings of a hawk as the ensign of rank. From the top of each cap rose eighteen inches high a single spike held erect by a twisted wire. The disguises for man and horse were made of cheap unbleached domestic and weighed less than three pounds. They were easily folded within a blanket and kept under the saddle in a crowd without discovery. It required less than two minutes to remove the saddles, place the disguises, and remount.

At the signal of a whistle, the men and horses arrayed in white and scarlet swung into double-file cavalry formation and stood awaiting orders. The moon was now shining brightly, and its light shimmering on the silent horses and men with their tall spiked caps made a picture such as the world had not seen since the Knights of the Middle Ages rode on their Holy Crusades.

As the train neared the flag-station, which was dark and unattended, the conductor approached Gus, leaned over, and said: "I've just gotten a message from the sheriff telling me to warn you to get off at this station and slip into town. There's a crowd at the depot there waiting for you and they mean trouble."

Gus trembled and whispered:

"Den fur Gawd's sake lemme off here."

The two men who got on at the station below stepped out before the negro, and as he alighted from the car, seized, tripped, and threw him to the ground. The engineer blew a sharp signal, and the train pulled on.

In a minute Gus was bound and gagged.

One of the men drew a whistle and blew twice. A single tremulous call like the cry of an owl answered. The swift beat of horses' feet followed, and four white-and-scarlet clansmen swept in a circle around the group.

One of the strangers turned to the horseman with red-winged ensign on his cap, saluted, and said:

"Here's your man, Night Hawk."

"Thanks, gentlemen," was the answer. "Let us know when we can be of service to your county."

The strangers sprang into their buggy and disappeared toward the North Carolina line.

The clansmen blindfolded the negro, placed him on a horse, tied his legs securely, and his arms behind him to the ring in the saddle.

The Night Hawk blew his whistle four sharp blasts, and his pickets galloped from their positions and joined him.

Again the signal rang, and his men wheeled with the precision of trained cavalrymen into column formation three abreast, and rode toward Piedmont, the single black figure tied and gagged in the centre of the white-and-scarlet squadron.



CHAPTER II

THE FIERY CROSS

The clansmen with their prisoner skirted the village and halted in the woods on the river bank. The Night Hawk signalled for single file, and in a few minutes they stood against the cliff under Lover's Leap and saluted their chief, who sat his horse, awaiting their arrival.

Pickets were placed in each direction on the narrow path by which the spot was approached, and one was sent to stand guard on the shelving rock above.

Through the narrow crooked entrance they led Gus into the cave which had been the rendezvous of the Piedmont Den of the Clan since its formation. The meeting-place was a grand hall eighty feet deep, fifty feet wide, and more than forty feet in height, which had been carved out of the stone by the swift current of the river in ages past when its waters stood at a higher level.

To-night it was lighted by candles placed on the ledges of the walls. In the centre, on a fallen boulder, sat the Grand Cyclops of the Den, the presiding officer of the township, his rank marked by scarlet stripes on the white-cloth spike of his cap. Around him stood twenty or more clansmen in their uniform, completely disguised. One among them wore a yellow sash, trimmed in gold, about his waist, and on his breast two yellow circles with red crosses interlapping, denoting his rank to be the Grand Dragon of the Realm, or Commander-in-Chief of the State.

The Cyclops rose from his seat:

"Let the Grand Turk remove his prisoner for a moment and place him in charge of the Grand Sentinel at the door, until summoned."

The officer disappeared with Gus, and the Cyclops continued:

"The Chaplain will open our Council with prayer."

Solemnly every white-shrouded figure knelt on the ground, and the voice of the Rev. Hugh McAlpin, trembling with feeling, echoed through the cave:

"Lord God of our Fathers, as in times past thy children, fleeing from the oppressor, found refuge beneath the earth until once more the sun of righteousness rose, so are we met to-night. As we wrestle with the powers of darkness now strangling our life, give to our souls to endure as seeing the invisible, and to our right arms the strength of the martyred dead of our people. Have mercy on the poor, the weak, the innocent and defenceless, and deliver us from the body of the Black Death. In a land of light and beauty and love our women are prisoners of danger and fear. While the heathen walks his native heath unharmed and unafraid, in this fair Christian Southland our sisters, wives, and daughters dare not stroll at twilight through the streets or step beyond the highway at noon. The terror of the twilight deepens with the darkness, and the stoutest heart grows sick with fear for the red message the morning bringeth. Forgive our sins—they are many—but hide not thy face from us, O God, for thou art our refuge!"

As the last echoes of the prayer lingered and died in the vaulted roof, the clansmen rose and stood a moment in silence.

Again the voice of the Cyclops broke the stillness:

"Brethren, we are met to-night at the request of the Grand Dragon of the Realm, who has honoured us with his presence, to constitute a High Court for the trial of a case involving life. Are the Night Hawks ready to submit their evidence?"

"We are ready," came the answer.

"Then let the Grand Scribe read the objects of the Order on which your authority rests."

The Scribe opened his Book of Record, "The Prescript of the Order of the Invisible Empire," and solemnly read:

"To the lovers of law and order, peace and justice, and to the shades of the venerated dead, greeting:

"This is an institution of Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, and Patriotism: embodying in its genius and principles all that is chivalric in conduct, noble in sentiment, generous in manhood, and patriotic in purpose: its particular objects being,

"First: To protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenceless from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the brutal; to relieve the injured and the oppressed: to succour the suffering and unfortunate, and especially the widows and the orphans of Confederate Soldiers.

"Second: To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and all the laws passed in conformity thereto, and to protect the States and the people thereof from all invasion from any source whatever.

"Third: To aid and assist in the execution of all Constitutional laws, and to protect the people from unlawful seizure, and from trial except by their peers in conformity to the laws of the land."

"The Night Hawks will produce their evidence," said the Cyclops, "and the Grand Monk will conduct the case of the people against the negro Augustus Caesar, the former slave of Dr. Richard Cameron."

Dr. Cameron advanced and removed his cap. His snow-white hair and beard, ruddy face and dark-brown brilliant eyes made a strange picture in its weird surroundings, like an ancient alchemist ready to conduct some daring experiment in the problem of life.

"I am here, brethren," he said, "to accuse the black brute about to appear of the crime of assault on a daughter of the South——"

A murmur of thrilling surprise and horror swept the crowd of white-and-scarlet figures as with one common impulse they moved closer.

"His feet have been measured and they exactly tally with the negro tracks found under the window of the Lenoir cottage. His flight to Columbia and return on the publication of their deaths as an accident is a confirmation of our case. I will not relate to you the scientific experiment which first fixed my suspicion of this man's guilt. My witness could not confirm it, and it might not be to you credible. But this negro is peculiarly sensitive to hypnotic influence. I propose to put him under this power to-night before you, and, if he is guilty, I can make him tell his confederates, describe and rehearse the crime itself."

The Night Hawks led Gus before Doctor Cameron, untied his hands, removed the gag, and slipped the blindfold from his head.

Under the doctor's rigid gaze the negro's knees struck together, and he collapsed into complete hypnosis, merely lifting his huge paws lamely as if to ward a blow.

They seated him on the boulder from which the Cyclops rose, and Gus stared about the cave and grinned as if in a dream seeing nothing.

The doctor recalled to him the day of the crime, and he began to talk to his three confederates, describing his plot in detail, now and then pausing and breaking into a fiendish laugh.

Old McAllister, who had three lovely daughters at home, threw off his cap, sank to his knees, and buried his face in his hands, while a dozen of the white figures crowded closer, nervously gripping the revolvers which hung from their red belts.

Doctor Cameron pushed them back and lifted his hand in warning.

The negro began to live the crime with fearful realism—the journey past the hotel to make sure the victims had gone to their home; the visit to Aunt Cindy's cabin to find her there; lying in the field waiting for the last light of the village to go out; gloating with vulgar exultation over their plot, and planning other crimes to follow its success—how they crept along the shadows of the hedgerow of the lawn to avoid the moonlight, stood under the cedar, and through the open windows watched the mother and daughter laughing and talking within——

"Min' what I tells you now—Tie de ole one, when I gib you de rope," said Gus in a whisper.

"My God!" cried the agonized voice of the figure with the double cross—"that's what the piece of burnt rope in the fireplace meant!"

Doctor Cameron again lifted his hand for silence.

Now they burst into the room, and with the light of hell in his beady, yellow-splotched eyes, Gus gripped his imaginary revolver and growled:

"Scream, an' I blow yer brains out!"

In spite of Doctor Cameron's warning, the white-robed figures jostled and pressed closer——

Gus rose to his feet and started across the cave as if to spring on the shivering figure of the girl, the clansmen with muttered groans, sobs, and curses falling back as he advanced. He still wore his full Captain's uniform, its heavy epaulets flashing their gold in the unearthly light, his beastly jaws half covering the gold braid on the collar. His thick lips were drawn upward in an ugly leer and his sinister bead eyes gleamed like a gorilla's. A single fierce leap and the black claws clutched the air slowly as if sinking into the soft white throat.

Strong men began to cry like children.

"Stop him! Stop him!" screamed a clansman, springing on the negro and grinding his heel into his big thick neck. A dozen more were on him in a moment, kicking, stamping, cursing, and crying like madmen.

Doctor Cameron leaped forward and beat them off:

"Men! Men! You must not kill him in this condition!"

Some of the white figures had fallen prostrate on the ground, sobbing in a frenzy of uncontrollable emotion. Some were leaning against the walls, their faces buried in their arms.

Again old McAllister was on his knees crying over and over again:

"God have mercy on my people!"

When at length quiet was restored, the negro was revived, and again bound, blindfolded, gagged, and thrown to the ground before the Grand Cyclops.

A sudden inspiration flashed in Doctor Cameron's eyes. Turning to the figure with yellow sash and double cross he said:

"Issue your orders and despatch your courier to-night with the old Scottish rite of the Fiery Cross. It will send a thrill of inspiration to every clansman in the hills."

"Good—prepare it quickly!" was the answer.

Doctor Cameron opened his medicine case, drew the silver drinking-cover from a flask, and passed out of the cave to the dark circle of blood still shining in the sand by the water's edge. He knelt and filled the cup half full of the crimson grains, and dipped it into the river. From a saddle he took the lightwood torch, returned within, and placed the cup on the boulder on which the Grand Cyclops had sat. He loosed the bundle of lightwood, took two pieces, tied them into the form of a cross, and laid it beside a lighted candle near the silver cup.

The silent figures watched his every movement. He lifted the cup and said:

"Brethren, I hold in my hand the water of your river bearing the red stain of the life of a Southern woman, a priceless sacrifice on the altar of outraged civilization. Hear the message of your chief."

The tall figure with the yellow sash and double cross stepped before the strange altar, while the white forms of the clansmen gathered about him in a circle. He lifted his cap, and laid it on the boulder, and his men gazed on the flushed face of Ben Cameron, the Grand Dragon of the Realm.

He stood for a moment silent, erect, a smouldering fierceness in his eyes, something cruel and yet magnetic in his alert bearing.

He looked on the prostrate negro lying in his uniform at his feet, seized the cross, lighted the three upper ends and held it blazing in his hand, while, in a voice full of the fires of feeling, he said:

"Men of the South, the time for words has passed, the hour for action has struck. The Grand Turk will execute this negro to-night and fling his body on the lawn of the black Lieutenant-Governor of the State."

The Grand Turk bowed.

"I ask for the swiftest messenger of this Den who can ride till dawn."

The man whom Doctor Cameron had already chosen stepped forward:

"Carry my summons to the Grand Titan of the adjoining province in North Carolina whom you will find at Hambright. Tell him the story of this crime and what you have seen and heard. Ask him to report to me here the second night from this, at eleven o'clock, with six Grand Giants from his adjoining counties, each accompanied by two hundred picked men. In olden times when the Chieftain of our people summoned the clan on an errand of life and death, the Fiery Cross, extinguished in sacrificial blood, was sent by swift courier from village to village. This call was never made in vain, nor will it be to-night, in the new world. Here, on this spot made holy ground by the blood of those we hold dearer than life, I raise the ancient symbol of an unconquered race of men——"

High above his head in the darkness of the cave he lifted the blazing emblem——

"The Fiery Cross of old Scotland's hills! I quench its flames in the sweetest blood that ever stained the sands of Time."

He dipped its ends in the silver cup, extinguished the fire, and handed the charred symbol to the courier, who quickly disappeared.



CHAPTER III

THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

The discovery of the Captain of the African Guards lying in his full uniform in Lynch's yard send a thrill of terror to the triumphant leagues. Across the breast of the body was pinned a scrap of paper on which was written in red ink the letters K. K. K. It was the first actual evidence of the existence of this dreaded order in Ulster county.

The First Lieutenant of the Guards assumed command and held the full company in their armoury under arms day and night. Beneath his door he had found a notice which was also nailed on the courthouse. It appeared in the Piedmont Eagle and in rapid succession in every newspaper not under negro influence in the State. It read as follows:

"HEADQUARTERS OF REALM NO 4. "DREADFUL ERA, BLACK EPOCH, "HIDEOUS HOUR.

"GENERAL ORDER NO. I.

"The Negro Militia now organized in this State threatens the extinction of civilization. They have avowed their purpose to make war upon and exterminate the Ku Klux Klan, an organization which is now the sole guardian of Society. All negroes are hereby given forty-eight hours from the publication of this notice in their respective counties to surrender their arms at the courthouse door. Those who refuse must take the consequences.

"By order of the G. D. of Realm No. 4.

"By the Grand Scribe."

The white people of Piedmont read this notice with a thrill of exultant joy. Men walked the streets with an erect bearing which said without words:

"Stand out of the way."

For the first time since the dawn of Black Rule negroes began to yield to white men and women the right of way on the streets.

On the day following, the old Commoner sent for Phil.

"What is the latest news?" he asked.

"The town is in a fever of excitement—not over the discovery in Lynch's yard—but over the blacker rumour that Marion and her mother committed suicide to conceal an assault by this fiend."

"A trumped-up lie," said the old man emphatically.

"It's true, sir. I'll take Doctor Cameron's word for it."

"You have just come from the Camerons?"

"Yes."

"Let it be your last visit. The Camerons are on the road to the gallows, father and son. Lynch informs me that the murder committed last night, and the insolent notice nailed on the courthouse door, could have come only from their brain. They are the hereditary leaders of these people. They alone would have the audacity to fling this crime into the teeth of the world and threaten worse. We are face to face with Southern barbarism. Every man now to his own standard! The house of Stoneman can have no part with midnight assassins."

"Nor with black barbarians, father. It is a question of who possesses the right of life and death over the citizen, the organized virtue of the community, or its organized crime. You have mistaken for death the patience of a generous people. We call ourselves the champions of liberty. Yet for less than they have suffered, kings have lost their heads and empires perished before the wrath of freemen."

"My boy, this is not a question for argument between us," said the father with stern emphasis. "This conspiracy of terror and assassination threatens to shatter my work to atoms. The election on which turns the destiny of Congress, and the success or failure of my life, is but a few weeks away. Unless this foul conspiracy is crushed, I am ruined, and the Nation falls again beneath the heel of a slaveholders' oligarchy."

"Your nightmare of a slaveholders' oligarchy does not disturb me."

"At least you will have the decency to break your affair with Margaret Cameron pending the issue of my struggle of life and death with her father and brother?"

"Never."

"Then I will do it for you."

"I warn you, sir," Phil cried, with anger, "that if it comes to an issue of race against race, I am a white man. The ghastly tragedy of the condition of society here is something for which the people of the South are no longer responsible——"

"I'll take the responsibility!" growled the old cynic.

"Don't ask me to share it," said the younger man emphatically.

The father winced, his lips trembled, and he answered brokenly:

"My boy, this is the bitterest hour of my life that has had little to make it sweet. To hear such words from you is more than I can bear. I am an old man now—my sands are nearly run. But two human beings love me, and I love but two. On you and your sister I have lavished all the treasures of a maimed and strangled soul—and it has come to this! Read the notice which one of your friends thrust into the window of my bedroom last night."

He handed Phil a piece of paper on which was written:

"The old club-footed beast who has sneaked into our town, pretending to search for health, in reality the leader of the infernal Union League, will be given forty-eight hours to vacate the house and rid this community of his presence.

"K. K. K."

"Are you an officer of the Union League?" Phil asked in surprise.

"I am its soul."

"How could a Southerner discover this, if your own children didn't know it?"

"By their spies who have joined the League."

"And do the rank and file know the Black Pope at the head of the order?"

"No, but high officials do."

"Does Lynch?"

"Certainly."

"Then he is the scoundrel who placed that note in your room. It is a clumsy attempt to forge an order of the Klan. The white man does not live in this town capable of that act. I know these people."

"My boy, you are bewitched by the smiles of a woman to deny your own flesh and blood."

"Nonsense, father—you are possessed by an idea which has become an insane mania——"

"Will you respect my wishes?" the old man broke in angrily.

"I will not," was the clear answer. Phil turned and left the room, and the old man's massive head sank on his breast in helpless baffled rage and grief.

He was more successful in his appeal to Elsie. He convinced her of the genuineness of the threat against him. The brutal reference to his lameness roused the girl's soul. When the old man, crushed by Phil's desertion, broke down the last reserve of his strange cold nature, tore his wounded heart open to her, cried in agony over his deformity, his lameness, and the anguish with which he saw the threatened ruin of his life-work, she threw her arms around his neck in a flood of tears and cried:

"Hush, father, I will not desert you. I will never leave you, or wed without your blessing. If I find that my lover was in any way responsible for this insult, I'll tear his image out of my heart and never speak his name again!"

She wrote a note to Ben, asking him to meet her at sundown on horseback at Lover's Leap.

Ben was elated at the unexpected request. He was hungry for an hour with his sweetheart, whom he had not seen save for a moment since the storm of excitement broke following the discovery of the crime.

He hastened through his work of ordering the movement of the Klan for the night, and determined to surprise Elsie by meeting her in his uniform of a Grand Dragon.

Secure in her loyalty, he would deliberately thus put his life in her hands. Using the water of a brook in the woods for a mirror, he adjusted his yellow sash and pushed the two revolvers back under the cape out of sight, saying to himself with a laugh:

"Betray me? Well, if she does, life would not be worth the living!"

When Elsie had recovered from the first shock of surprise at the white horse and rider waiting for her under the shadows of the old beech, her surprise gave way to grief at the certainty of his guilt, and the greatness of his love in thus placing his life without a question in her hands.

He tied the horses in the woods, and they sat down on the rustic.

He removed his helmet cap, threw back the white cape showing the scarlet lining, and the two golden circles with their flaming crosses on his breast, with boyish pride. The costume was becoming to his slender graceful figure, and he knew it.

"You see, sweetheart, I hold high rank in the Empire," he whispered.

From beneath his cape he drew a long bundle which he unrolled. It was a triangular flag of brilliant yellow edged in scarlet. In the centre of the yellow ground was the figure of a huge black dragon with fiery red eyes and tongue. Around it was a Latin motto worked in scarlet: "quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus"—what always, what everywhere, what by all has been held to be true. "The battle-flag of the Klan," he said; "the standard of the Grand Dragon."

Elsie seized his hand and kissed it, unable to speak.

"Why so serious to-night?"

"Do you love me very much?" she answered.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay his life at the feet of his beloved," he responded tenderly.

"Yes, yes; I know—and that is why you are breaking my heart. When first I met you—it seems now ages and ages ago—I was a vain, self-willed, pert little thing——"

"It's not so. I took you for an angel—you were one. You are one to-night."

"Now," she went on slowly, "in what I have lived through you I have grown into an impassioned, serious, self-disciplined, bewildered woman. Your perfect trust to-night is the sweetest revelation that can come to a woman's soul and yet it brings to me unspeakable pain——"

"For what?"

"You are guilty of murder."

Ben's figure stiffened.

"The judge who pronounces sentence of death on a criminal outlawed by civilized society is not usually called a murderer, my dear."

"And by whose authority are you a judge?"

"By authority of the sovereign people who created the State of South Carolina. The criminals who claim to be our officers are usurpers placed there by the subversion of law."

"Won't you give this all up for my sake?" she pleaded. "Believe me, you are in great danger."

"Not so great as is the danger of my sister and mother and my sweetheart—it is a man's place to face danger," he gravely answered.

"This violence can only lead to your ruin and shame——"

"I am fighting the battle of a race on whose fate hangs the future of the South and the Nation. My ruin and shame will be of small account if they are saved," was the even answer.

"Come, my dear," she pleaded tenderly, "you know that I have weighed the treasures of music and art and given them all for one clasp of your hand, one throb of your heart against mine. I should call you cruel did I not know you are infinitely tender. This is the only thing I have ever asked you to do for me——"

"Desert my people! You must not ask of me this infamy, if you love me," he cried.

"But, listen; this is wrong—this wild vengeance is a crime you are doing, however great the provocation. We cannot continue to love one another if you do this. Listen: I love you better than father, mother, life, or career—all my dreams I've lost in you. I've lived through eternity to-day with my father——"

"You know me guiltless of the vulgar threat against him——"

"Yes, and yet you are the leader of desperate men who might have done it. As I fought this battle to-day, I've lost you, lost myself, and sunk down to the depths of despair, and at the end rang the one weak cry of a woman's heart for her lover! Your frown can darken the brightest sky. For your sake I can give up all save the sense of right. I'll walk by your side in life—lead you gently and tenderly along the way of my dreams if I can, but if you go your way, it shall be mine; and I shall still be glad because you are there! See how humble I am—only you must not commit crime!"

"Come, sweetheart, you must not use that word," he protested, with a touch of wounded pride.

"You are a conspirator——"

"I am a revolutionist."

"You are committing murder!"

"I am waging war."

Elsie leaped to her feet in a sudden rush of anger and extended her hand:

"Good-bye. I shall not see you again. I do not know you. You are still a stranger to me."

He held her hand firmly.

"We must not part in anger," he said slowly. "I have grave work to do before the day dawns. We may not see each other again."

She led her horse to the seat quickly and without waiting for his assistance sprang into the saddle.

"Do you not fear my betrayal of your secret?" she asked.

He rode to her side, bent close, and whispered:

"It's as safe as if locked in the heart of God."

A little sob caught her voice, yet she said slowly in firm tones:

"If another crime is committed in this county by your Klan, we will never see each other again."

He escorted her to the edge of the town without a word, pressed her hand in silence, wheeled his horse, and disappeared on the road to the North Carolina line.



CHAPTER IV

THE BANNER OF THE DRAGON

Ben Cameron rode rapidly to the rendezvous of the pickets who were to meet the coming squadrons.

He returned home and ate a hearty meal. As he emerged from the dining-room, Phil seized him by the arm and led him under the big oak on the lawn:

"Cameron, old boy, I'm in a lot of trouble. I've had a quarrel with my father, and your sister has broken me all up by returning my ring. I want a little excitement to ease my nerves. From Elsie's incoherent talk I judge you are in danger. If there's going to be a fight, let me in."

Ben took his hand:

"You're the kind of a man I'd like to have for a brother, and I'll help you in love—but as for war—it's not your fight. We don't need help."

At ten o'clock Ben met the local Den at their rendezvous under the cliff, to prepare for the events of the night.

The forty members present were drawn up before him in double rank of twenty each.

"Brethren," he said to them solemnly, "I have called you to-night to take a step from which there can be no retreat. We are going to make a daring experiment of the utmost importance. If there is a faint heart among you, now is the time to retire——"

"We are with you!" cried the men.

"There are laws of our race, old before this Republic was born in the souls of white freemen. The fiat of fools has repealed on paper these laws. Your fathers who created this Nation were first Conspirators, then Revolutionists, now Patriots and Saints. I need to-night ten volunteers to lead the coming clansmen over this county and disarm every negro in it. The men from North Carolina cannot be recognized. Each of you must run this risk. Your absence from home to-night will be doubly dangerous for what will be done here at this negro armoury under my command. I ask of these ten men to ride their horses until dawn, even unto death, to ride for their God, their native land, and the womanhood of the South!

"To each man who accepts this dangerous mission I offer for your bed the earth, for your canopy the sky, for your bread stones; and when the flash of bayonets shall fling into your face from the Square the challenge of martial law, the protection I promise you—is exile, imprisonment, and death! Let the ten men who accept these terms step forward four paces."

With a single impulse the whole double line of forty white-and-scarlet figures moved quickly forward four steps!

The leader shook hands with each man, his voice throbbing with emotion as he said:

"Stand together like this, men, and armies will march and countermarch over the South in vain! We will save the life of our people."

The ten guides selected by the Grand Dragon rode forward, and each led a division of one hundred men through the ten townships of the county and successfully disarmed every negro before day without the loss of a life.

The remaining squadron of two hundred and fifty men from Hambright, accompanied by the Grand Titan in command of the Province of Western Hill Counties, were led by Ben Cameron into Piedmont as the waning moon rose between twelve and one o'clock.

They marched past Stoneman's place on the way to the negro armoury, which stood on the opposite side of the street a block below.

The wild music of the beat of a thousand hoofs on the cobblestones of the street waked every sleeper. The old Commoner hobbled to his window and watched them pass, his big hands fumbling nervously, and his soul stirred to its depths.

The ghostlike shadowy columns moved slowly with the deliberate consciousness of power. The scarlet circles on their breasts could be easily seen when one turned toward the house, as could the big red letters K. K. K. on each horse's flank.

In the centre of the line waved from a gold-tipped spear the battle-flag of the Klan. As they passed the bright lights burning at his gate, old Stoneman could see this standard plainly. The huge black dragon with flaming eyes and tongue seemed a living thing crawling over a scarlet-tipped yellow cloud.