University of Virginia Library

Book Three—The Trial by Fire

4. CHAPTER IV
THE UNSPOKEN TERROR

When Gaston reached Hambright the following day, and whispered to his mother the good news, he hastened to tell his friend Tom Camp. The young man's heart warmed toward the white-haired old soldier in this hour of his victory. With sparkling eyes, he told Tom of his stormy scene with the General, of its curious ending, and the hours he spent in heaven beneath the limbs of an old magnolia.

Tom listened with rapture. "Ah, didn't I tell you, if you hung on you'd get her by-and-by? So you bearded the General in his den did you? I'll bet his eyes blazed when he seed you! He's got an awful temper when you rile him. You ought to seed him one day when our brigade was ordered into a charge where three concealed batteries was cross firin' and men was fallin' like wheat under the knife. Geeminy but didn't he cuss! He wouldn't take the order fust from the orderly, and sent to know if the Major-General meant it. I tell you us fellers that was layin' there in the grass listenin' to them bullets singin' thought he was the finest cusser that ever ripped an oath.

"He reared and he charged, and he cussed, and he damned that man for tryin' to butcher his men, and he never moved till the third order came. That was the night ten thousand wounded men lay on the field, and me in the middle of 'em with a Minie ball in my shoulder.

TOM CAMP.
Portrait from life.

[Description: Portrait of Tom Camp. ]

The Yankees and our men was all mixed up together, and just after dark the full moon came up through the trees and you could see as plain as day. I begun to sing the old hymn, "There is a land of pure delight," and you ought to have heard them ten thousand wounded men sing!

"While we was singing the General came through lookin' up his men. He seed me and said,

'Is that you, Tom Camp?'

"I looked up at him, and he was crying like a child, and he went on from man to man cryin' and cussin' the fool that sent us into that hell-hole. The General's a rough man, if you rub his fur the wrong way, but his heart's all right. He's all gold I tell you!"

"Well, I'm in for a tussle with him, Tom."

"Shucks, man, you can beat him with one hand tied behind you if you've got his gal's heart. She's got his fire, and a gal as purty as she is can just about do what she pleases in this world."

"I hope she can bring him around. I like the General. I'd much rather not fight him."

"Where's Flora?" cried Tom looking around in alarm.

"I saw her going toward the spring in the edge of the woods there a minute ago," replied Gaston.

Tom sprang up and began to hop and jump down the path toward the spring with incredible rapidity.

Flora was playing in the branch below the spring and Tom saw the form of a negro man passing over the opposite hill going along the spring path that led in that direction.

"Was you talkin' with that nigger, Flora?" asked Tom holding his hand on his side and trying to recover his breath.

"Yes, I said howdy, when he stopped to get a drink

of water, and he give me a whistle," she replied with a pout of her pretty lips and a frown.

Tom seized her by the arm and shook her. "Didn't I tell you to run every time you seed a nigger unless I was with you!"

"Yes, but he wasn't hurtin' me and you are!" she cried bursting into tears.

"I've a notion to whip you good for this!" Tom stormed.

"Don't Tom, she won't do it any more, will, you Flora?" pleaded Gaston taking her in his arms and starting to the house with her. When they reached the house, Tom was still pale and trembling with excitement.

"Lord, there's so many triflin' niggers loafin' round the county now stealing and doin' all sorts of devilment, I'm scared to death about that child. She don't seem any more afraid of 'em than she is of a cat."

'I don't believe anybody would hurt Flora, Tom,—she's such a little angel," said Gaston kissing the tears from the child's face.

"She is cute—ain't she?" said Tom with pride. I've wished many a time lately I'd gone out West with them Yankee fellers that took such a likin' to me in the war. They told me that a poor white man had a chance out there, and that there wern't a nigger in twenty miles of their home. But then I lost my leg, how could I go?

He sat dreaming with open eyes for a moment and continued, looking tenderly a Flora, "But, baby, don't you dare go nigh er nigger, or let one get nigh you no more 'n you would a rattlesnake!"

"I won't Pappy! she cried with an incredulous smile at his warning of danger that made Tom's heart sick. She was all joy and laughter, full of health and bubbling

life. She believed with a child's simple faith that all nature was as innocent as her own heart.

Tom smoothed her curls and kissed her at least, and she slipped her arm around his neck and squeezed it tight.

"Ain't she purty and sweet now?" he exclaimed.

"Tom, you'll spoil her yet," warned Gaston as he smiled and took his leave, throwing a kiss to Flora as he passed through the little yard gate. Tom had built a fence close around his house when Flora was a baby to shut her in while he was at work.

Two days later about five o'clock in the afternoon as Gaston sat in his office writing a letter to his sweetheart, his face aglow with love and the certainty that she was his, as he read and re-read her last glowing words he was startled by the sudden clang of the court house bell. At first he did not move, only looking up from his paper. Sometimes mischievous boys rang the bell and ran down the steps before any one could catch them. But the bell continued its swift stroke seeming to grow louder and wilder every moment. He saw a man rush across the square, and then the bell of the Methodist, and then of the Baptist churches joined their clamour to the alarm.

He snapped the lid of his desk, snatched his hat and ran down the steps.

As he reached the street, he heard the long piercing cry of a woman's voice, high, strenuous, quivering!

"A lost child! A lost child!"

What a cry! He was never so thrilled and awed by a human voice. In it was trembling all the anguish of every mother's broken heart transmitted through the centuries!

At the court house door an excited group had gathered. A man was standing on the steps gesticulating wildly and telling the crowd all he knew about it. Over the din he caught the name,

"Tom Camp's Flora!"

He breathed hard, bit his lips and prayed instinctively.

"Lord have mercy on the poor old man! It will kill him!" A great fear brooded over the hearts of the crowd, and soon the tumult was hushed into an awed silence.

In Gaston's heart that fear became a horrible certainty from the first. Within a half hour a thousand white people were in the crowd. Gaston stood among them, cool and masterful, organising them in searching parties, and giving to each group the signals to be used.

In a moment the white race had fused into a homogeneous mass of love, sympathy, hate, and revenge. The rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, the banker and the blacksmith, the great and the small, they were all one now. The sorrow of that old one-legged soldier was the sorrow of all, every heart beat with his, and his life was their life, and his child their child.

But at the end of an hour there was not a negro among them! By some subtle instinct they had recognised the secret feelings and fears of the crowd and had disappeared. Had they been beasts of the field the gulf between them would not have been deeper.

When Gaston reached Tom's house the crowd was divided into the groups agreed upon and a signal gun given to each. If the child was not dead when found two should be fired—if dead, but one.

He sought Tom to be sure there was no mistake and that the child had not fallen asleep about the house. He found the old man shut up in his room kneeling in the middle of the floor praying.

When Gaston laid his hand gently on his shoulder his lips ceased to move, and he looked at him in a dazed sort of way at first without speaking.

"Oh!—it's you, Charlie!" he sighed.

"Yes, Tom, tell me quick. Are you sure she is nowhere in the house?"

"Sure!—Sure?" he cried in a helpless stare. "Yes, yes, I found her bonnet at the spring. I looked everywhere for an hour before I called the neighbours!"

"Then I'm off with the searchers. The signal is two guns if they find her alive. One gun if she is dead. You will understand."

"Yes, Charlie," answered the old soldier in a faraway tone of voice, "and don't forget to help me pray while you look for her."

"I've tried already, Tom," he answered as he pressed his hand and left the house. All night long the search continued, and no signal gun was heard. Torches and lanterns gleamed from every field and wood, byway and hedge for miles in every direction.

Through every hour of this awful night Tom Camp was in his room praying—his face now streaming with tears, now dry and white with the unspoken terror that could stop the beat of his heart. His white hair and snow-white beard were dishevelled, as he unconsciously tore them with his trembling hands. Now he was crying in an agony of intensity,

"As thy servant of old wrestled with the angel of the Lord through the night, so, oh God, will I lie at Thy feet and wrestle and pray! I will not let Thee go until Thou bless me! Though I perish, let her live! I have lost all and praised Thee still. Lord, Thou canst not leave me desolate!"

From the pain of his wound and the exhaustion of soul and body he fainted once with his lips still moving in prayer. For more than an hour he lay as one dead. When he revived, he looked at his clock and it was but an hour till dawn.

Again he fell on his knees, and again the broken accents

of his husky voice could be heard wrestling with God. Now he would beg and plead like a child, and then he would rise in the unconscious dignity of an immortal soul in combat with the powers of the infinite and his language was in the sublime speech of the old Hebrew seers!

Just before the sun rose the signal gun pealed its message of life, ONE! TWO! in rapid succession.

Tom sprang to his feet with blazing eyes. One! Two! echoed the guns from another hill, and fainter grew its repeated call from group to group of the searchers.

"There! Glory to God!" He screamed at the top of his voice, the last note of his triumphant shout breaking into sobs. "God be praised! I knew they would find her—she's not dead, she's alive! alive! oh! my soul, lift up thy head!"

The tramp of swift feet as heard at the door and Gaston told him with husky stammering voice,

"She's alive Tom, but unconscious. I'll have her brought to the house. She was found just where your spring branch runs into the Flat Rock, not five hundred yards from here in those woods. Say where you are. We will bring her in a minute."

Gaston bounded back to the scene.

Tom paid no attention to his orders to stay at home, but sprang after him jumping and falling and scrambling up again as he followed. Before they knew it he was upon the excited tearful group that stood in a circle around the child's body.

Gaston, who was standing on the opposite side from Tom's approach, saw him and shouted,

"My God, men, stop him! Don't let him see her yet!"

But Tom was too quick for them. He brushed aside the boy who caught at him, as though a feather, crying,

"Stand back!"

The circle of men fell away from the body and in a moment Tom stood over it transfixed with horror.

Flora lay on the ground with her clothes torn to shreds and stained with blood. Her beautiful yellow curls were matted across her forehead in a dark red lump beside a wound where her skull had been crushed. The stone lay at her side, the crimson mark of her life showing on its jagged edges.

With that stone the brute had tried to strike the death blow. She was lying on the edge of the hill with her head up the incline. It was too plain, the terrible crime that had been committed.

The poor father sank beside her body with an inarticulate groan as though some one had crushed his head with an axe. He seemed dazed for a moment, and looking around he shouted hoarsely,

"The doctor boys! The doctor quick! For God's sake, quick! She's not dead yet—we may save her—help—help!" he sank again to the ground limp and faint from pain and was soon insensible.

Gaston gathered the child tenderly in his arms and carried her to the house. The men hastily made a stretcher and carried Tom behind him.

5. CHAPTER V
A THOUSAND-LEGGED BEAST

While Gaston and the men were carrying Flora and Tom to the house, another searching party was formed. There were no women and children among than, only grim-visaged silent men, and a pair of little mild-eyed sharp-nosed blood-hounds. All the morning men were coming in from the country and joining this silent army of searchers.

Doctor Graham came, looked long and gravely at Flora and turned a sad face toward Tom.

"Now, doctor wait—don't say a word yet. I don't want to know the truth, if it's the worst. Don't kill me in a minute. Let me live as long as there's breath in her body—after that! well, that's the end—there's nothin after that!"

The doctor started to speak.

"Wait," pleaded Tom, "let me tell you something. I've been praying all night. I've seen God face to face. She can't die. He told me so—"

He paused and his grip on the doctor's arm relaxed as though he were about to faint, but he rallied.

The kindly old doctor said gently, "Sit down Tom."

He tried to lead Tom away from the bed, but he held on like a bull dog.

The child breathed heavily and moaned.

Tom's face brightened. "She's comin' to, doctor,—thank God!"

The doctor paid no more attention to him and went on with his work as best he could.

Tom laid his tear-stained face close to hers, and murmured soothingly to her as he used to when she was a wee baby in his arms,

"There, there, honey, it will be all right now! The doctor's here, and he'll do all he can! And what can't do, God will. The doctor'll save you. God will save you! He loves you. He loves me. I prayed all night. He heard me. I saw the shinin' glory of His face! He's only tryin' His poor old servant.

The broken artery was found and tied and the bleeding stopped. When the wound on her head was dressed the doctor turned to Tom,

"That wound is bad, but not necessarily fatal."

"Praise God!"

"Keep the house quiet and don't let her see a strange face once she regains consciousness," was his parting injunction.

The next morning her breathing was regular, and pulse stronger, but feverish; and about seven o'clock she came out of her comatose state and regained consciousness. She spoke but once, and apparently at the sound of her own voice immediately went into a convulsion, clinching her little fists, screaming and calling to her father for help!

When Tom first heard that awful cry and saw her terrified eyes and drawn face, he tried to cover his own eyes and stop his ears. Then he gathered the little convulsed body into his arms and crooned into her ears,

"There, Pappy's baby, don't cry! Pappy's got you now. Nothin' can hurt you. There, there, nothin' shall come nigh you!"

He covered her face with tears and kisses while he whispered and soothed her to sleep. When the noon train came up from Independence, General Worth arrived. Tom had asked Gaston to telegraph for him in his name.

Tom eagerly grasped his hand. "General I knowed you'd come—you're a man to tie to. I never knowed you to fail me in your life. You're one of the smartest men in the world too. You never got us boys in a hole so deep you didn't pull us out"—

"What can I do for you?" interrupted the General.

"Ah, now's the worst of all, General. I'm in water too deep for me. My baby, the last one left on earth, the apple of my eye, all that holds my old achin' body to this world—she's—about—to—die! I can't let her. General, you must save her for me. I want more doctors. They say there's a great doctor at Independence. I want 'em all. Tell 'em it's a poor old one-legged soldier who's shot all to pieces and lost his wife and all his children—all but this one baby. And I can't lose her! They'll come if you ask 'em—" His voice broke.

"I'll do it, Tom. I'll have them here on a special in three hours or maybe sooner," returned the General pressing his hand and hurrying to the telegraph office.

The doctors arrived at three o'clock and held a consultation with Doctor Graham. They decided that the loss of blood had been so great that the only chance to save her was in the transfusion of blood.

"I'll give her the blood, Tom," said Gaston quietly removing his cost and baring his arm.

The old soldier looked up through grateful tears.

"Next to the General, you're the best friend God ever give me, boy!"

The General turned his face away and looked out of the window. The doctors immediately performed the operation, transfusing blood from Gaston into the child.

The results did not seem to promise what they had hoped. Her fever rose steadily. She became conscious again and immediately went into the most fearful convulsions, breaking the torn artery a second time.

Just as the sun sank behind the blue mountains' peaks in the west her heart fluttered and she was dead.

Tom sat by the bed for two hours, looking, looking, looking with wide staring eyes at her white dead face. There was not the trace of a tear. His mouth was set in a hard cold way and he never moved or spoke.

The Preacher tried to comfort Tom, who stared at him as though he did not recognise him at first, and then slowly began,

"Go away, Preacher, I don't want to see or talk to you now. It's all a swindle and a lie. There is no God!"

"Tom, Tom!" groaned the Preacher.

"I tell you I mean it," he continued. "I don't want any more of God or His heaven. I don't want to see God. For if I should see Him, I'd shake my fist in His face and ask Him where His almighty power was when my poor little baby was screamin' for help while that damned black beast was tearin' her to pieces! Many and many a time I've praised God when I read the Bible there where it said, not a sparrow falleth to the ground without His knowledge, and the very hairs of our head are numbered. Well, where was He when my little bird was flutterin' her broken bleedin' wings in the claws of that stinkin' baboon,—damn him to everlastin' hell!—It's all a swindle I tell you!"

The Preacher was watching him now with silent pity and tenderness.

"What a lie it all is!" Tom repeated. "Scratch my name off the church roll. I ain't got many more days here, but I won't lie. I'm not a hypocrite. I'm going to meet God cursin' Him to His face!"

The Preacher slipped his arm around the old soldier's neck, and smoothed the tangled hair back from his forehead as he said brokenly,

"Tom, I love you! My whole soul is melted in sympathy and pity for you!"

The stricken man looked up into the face of his friend, saw his tears and felt the warmth of his love flood his heart, and at last he burst into tears.

"Oh! Preacher, Preacher! you're a good friend I know, but I'm done, I can't live any more! Every minute, day and night, I'll hear them awful screams—her a callin' me for help! I can see her lyin' out there in the woods all night alone moanin' and bleedin'!"

His breast heaved and he paused as if in reverie. And then he sprang up, his face livid and convulsed with volcanic passions, that half strangled him while he shrieked,

"Oh! if I only had him here before me now, and God Almighty would give me strength with these hands to tear his breast open and rip his heart out!—I—could—eat—it—like—a—wolf!"

* * * * * *

When they reached the cemetery the next day and the body was about to be lowered into the grave, Tom suddenly spied old Uncle Reuben Worth leaning on his spade by the edge of the crowd. Uncle Reuben was the grave digger of the town and the only negro present.

"Wait!" said Tom raising his hand. "Don't put her in that grave! A nigger dug it. I can't stand it:" He turned to a group of old soldier comrades standing by and said,

"Boys, humour an old broken man once more. You'll dig another grave for me, won't you? It won't take long. The folks can go home that don't want to stay. I ain't got no home to go to now but this graveyard."

His comrades filled up the grave that Uncle Reuben had dug, and opened a new one on the other side of the graves where slept his other loved ones.

Gaston took Tom to his home and stayed with him several hours trying to help him. He seemed to have settled into a stupor from which nothing could rouse him When at length the old man fell asleep, Gaston softly closed the door and returned to his office with a heavy heart.

As he neared the centre of the town, he heard a murmur like the distant moaning of the wind in the hush that comes before a storm. It grew louder and louder and became articulate with occasional words that seemed far away and unreal. What could it be? He had never heard such a sound before. Now it became clearer and the murmur was the tread of a thousand feet and the clatter of horses' hoofs. Not a cry, or a shout, or a word. Silence and hurrying feet!

Ah! he knew now. It was a searchers returning, a grim swaying voiceless mob with one black figure amid them. They were swarming into the court house square under the big oak where an informal trial was to be held.

He rushed forward to protest against a lynching. He could just catch a glimpse of the negro's head swaying back and forth, protesting innocence in a singing monotone as though he were already half dead.

He pushed his way roughly through the excited crowd, to the centre where Hose Norman, the leader, stood with one end of a rope in his hand and the other around the negro's neck.

The negro turned his head quickly toward the movement made by the crowd as Gaston pressed forward.

It was Dick!

Dick recognised him at the same moment, leaped toward

and fell at his feet crying and pleading as he held his feet and legs.

"Save me, Charlie! I nebber done it! I nebber done it! For God's sake help me! Keep 'em off! Dey gwine burn me erlive!"

Gaston turned to the crowd. "Men, there's not one among you that loved that old soldier and his girl as I did. But you must not do this crime. If this negro is guilty, we can prove it in that court house there, and he will pay the penalty with his life. Give him a fair trial"—

"That's a lawyer talkin' now!" said a man in the crowd. "We know that tune. The lawyers has things their own way in a court house." A murmur of assent mingled with oaths ran through the crowd.

"Fair trial !" sneered Hose Norman snatching Dick from the ground by the rope. "Look at the black devil's clothes splotched all over with her blood. We found him under a shelvin' rock where he'd got by wadin' up the branch a quarter of a mile to fool the dogs. We found his track in the sand some places where he missed the water and tracked him clear from where we found Flora to the cave he was lying in. Fair trial—hell! We're just waitin' for er can o' oil. You go back and read your law books—we'll tend ter this devil."

The messenger came with the oil and the crowd moved forward. Hose shouted, "Down by Tom Camp's by his spring, down the spring branch to the Flat Rock where he killed her!"

On the crowd moved, swaying back and forth with Gaston in their midst by Dick's side begging for a fair trial for him. A crowd that hurries and does not shout is a fearful thing. There is something inhuman in its uncanny silence.

Gaston's voice sounded strained and discordant. They

"IT WAS DICK!"
Portrait from life.

[Description: Portrait of Dick. ]

paid no more attention to his protest than to the chirp of a cricket.

They reached the spot where the child's body had been found. They tied the screaming, praying negro to a live pine and piled around his body a great heap of dead wood and saturated it with oil. And then they poured oil on his clothes.

Gaston looked around him begging first one man then another to help him fight the crowd and rescue him. Not a hand was lifted, or a voice raised in protest. There was not a negro among them. Not only was no negro in that crowd, but there was not a cabin in all that county that would not have given shelter to that brute, though they knew him guilty of the crime charged against him. This was the one terrible fact that paralysed Gaston's efforts.

Hose Norman stepped forward to apply a match and Gaston grasped his arm.

"For God's sake, Hose, wait a minute!" he begged. "Don't disgrace our town, our county, our state, and our claims to humanity by this insane brutality. A beast wouldn't do this. You wouldn't kill a mad dog or a rattlesnake in such a way. If you will kill him, shoot him or knock him in the head with a rock,—don't burn him alive!"

Hose glared at him and quietly remarked,

"Are you done now? If you are, stand out of the way!"

He struck the match and Dick uttered a scream. As Hose leaned forward with his match Gaston knocked him down, and a dozen stalwart men were upon him in a moment.

"Knock the fool in the head!" one shouted.

"Pin his arms behind him!" said another.

Some one quickly pinioned his arms with a cord. He

stood in helpless rage and pity, and as he saw the match applied, bowed his head and burst into tears.

He looked up at the silent crowd standing there like voiceless ghosts with renewed wonder.

Under the glare of the light and the tears the crowd seemed to melt into a great crawling swaying creature, half reptile half beast, half dragon half man, with a thousand legs and a thousand eyes, and ten thousand gleaming teeth, and with no ear to hear and no heart to pity!

All they would grant him was the privilege of gathering Dick's ashes and charred bones for burial.

* * * * * *

The morning following the lynching, the Preacher hurried to Tom Camp's to see how he was bearing the strain.

His door was wide open, the bureau drawers pulled out, ransacked, and some of their contents were lying on the floor.

"Poor old fellow, I'm afraid he's gone crazy!" exclaimed the Preacher. He hurried to the cemetery. There he found Tom at the newly made grave. He had worked through the night and dug the grave open with his bare hands and pulled the coffin up out of the ground. He had broken his finger nails all off trying to open it and his fingers were bleeding. At last he had given up the effort to open the coffin, sat down beside it, and was arranging her toys he had made for her beside the box. He had brought a lot of her clothes, a pair of little shoes and stockings, and a bonnet, and he had placed these out carefully on top of the lid. He was talking to her.

The Preacher lifted him gently and led him away, a hopeless madman.

6. CHAPTER VI
THE BLACK PERIL

The longer Gaston pondered over the tragic events of that lynching the more sinister and terrible became its meaning, and the deeper he was plunged in melancholy.

Beyond all doubt, within his own memory, since the negroes under Legree's lead had drawn the colour line in politics, the races had been drifting steadily apart. The gulf was now impassable.

Such crimes as Dick had committed, and for which he had paid such an awful penalty, were unknown absolutely under slavery, and were unknown for two years after the war. Their first appearance was under Legree's régime. Now, scarcely a day passed in the South without the record of such an atrocity, swiftly followed by a lynching, and lynching thus had become a habit for all grave crimes.

Since McLeod's triumph in the state such crimes had increased with alarming rapidity. The encroachments of negroes upon public offices had been slow but resistless. Now there were nine hundred and fifty negro magistrates in the state elected for no reason except the colour of their skin. Feeling themselves intrenched behind state and Federal power, the insolence of a class of young negro men was becoming more and more intolerable. What would happen to these fools when once they roused that thousand-legged, thousand-eyed beast with its ten

thousand teeth and nails! He had looked into its face, and he shuddered to recall the hour.

He knew that this power of racial fury of the Anglo-Saxon when aroused was resistless, and that it would sweep its victims before its wrath like chaff before a whirlwind.

And then he thought of the day fast coming when culture and wealth would give the African the courage of conscious strength and he would answer that soul piercing shriek of his kindred for help, and that other thousand-legged beast, now crouching in the shadows, would meet thousand legged beast around that beacon fire of a Godless revenge!

More and more the impossible position of the Negro in America came home to his mind. He was fast being overwhelmed with the conviction that sooner or later we must squarely face the fact that two such races, counting millions in numbers, can not live together under a Democracy.

He recalled the fact that there were more negroes in the United States than inhabitants in Mexico, the third republic of the world.

Amalgamation simply meant Africanisation. The big nostrils, flat nose, massive jaw, protruding lip and kinky hair will register their animal marks over the proudest intellect and the rarest beauty of any other race. The rule that had no exception was that one drop of Negro blood makes a negro.

What could be the outcome of it? What was his duty as a citizen and a member of civilised society? Since the scenes through which he had passed with Tom Camp and that mob the question was insistent and personal. It clouded his soul and weighed on him like the horrors of a nightmare.

Again and again the fateful words the Preacher had

dinned into his ears since childhood pressed upon him,

"You can not build in a Democracy a nation inside a nation of two antagonistic races. The future American must be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto."

His depression and brooding over the fearful events in which he had so recently taken part had tinged his life and all its hopes with sadness. He had reflected this in his letters to Sallie Worth without even mentioning the events. His heart was full of sickening foreboding. How could one love and be happy in a world haunted by such horrors! He had begged her to hasten her hour of final decision. He told her of his sense of loneliness and isolation, and of his inexpressible need of her love and presence in his daily life.

Her answer had only intensified his moody feelings. She had written that her love grew stronger every day and his love more and more became necessary to her life, and yet she could not cloud its future with the anger of her father and the broken heart of her mother by an elopement. She feared such a shock would be fatal and all her life would be embittered by it. They must wait. She was using all her skill to win her father, but as yet without success. But she determined to win him, and it would be so.

All this seemed so far away and shadowy to Gaston's eager restless soul.

The letter had closed by saying she was preparing for another trip to Boston to visit Helen Lowell and that she should be absent at least a month. She asked that his next letter be addressed to Boston.

Somehow Boston seemed just then out of the world on another planet, it was so far away and its people and their life so unreal to his imagination.

But he sighed and turned resolutely to his work of

preparation for an event in his life which he meant to make great in the history of the state. It was the meeting of the Democratic convention, as yet nearly two years in the future. He held a subordinate position in his party's councils, but defeat and ruin had taken the conceit out of the old line leaders and he knew that his day was drawing near.

"I'll take my place among the leaders and masters of men," he told himself with quiet determination, "I will compel the General's respect; and if I can not win his consent, I will take her without it."

7. CHAPTER VII
EQUALITY WITH A RESERVATION

The lynching at Hambright had stirred the whole nation into unusual indignant interest. It happened to be the climax of a series of such crimes committed in the South in rapid succession, and the death of this negro was reported with more than usual vividness by a young newspaper man of genius.

A grand mass meeting was called in Cooper Union, New York, at which were gathered delegates from different cities and states to give emphasis and unity to the movement and issue an appeal to the national government.

When Sallie Worth reached Boston, she found Helen Lowell at home alone. The Hon. Everett Lowell had made one of the speeches of his career at the mass meeting held in Faneuil Hall, and he was in New York where he had gone to make the principal address in the Cooper Union Convention of Negro sympathisers.

George Harris had accompanied him, supremely fascinated by the eloquent and masterful appeal for human brotherhood he had heard him make in Boston. There was something pathetic in the dog-like worship this young negro gave to his brilliant patron. In his life in New England he had been shocked more than once by the brutal prejudices of the people against his race. His soul had been tried to the last of its powers of endurance at times. He found to his amazement that, when put to

the test, the masses of the North had even deeper repugnance to the person of a Negro than the Southerners who grew up with him from the cradle. He had found himself cut off from every honourable way of earning his bread, gentleman and scholar though he was, and had looked into the river as he walked over the bridge to Cambridge one night with a well-nigh resistless impulse to end it all.

But Lowell had cheered him, laughed his gloomy ideas to scorn, and more practical still, he had secured him a clerkship in the Custom House which settled the problem of bread. Others had failed him, but this man of trained powers had never failed him. He had taught him to lift up his head and look the world squarely in the face. Lowell was, to his vivid African imagination, the ideal man made in the image of God, calm in judgment, free from all superstitions and prejudices, a citizen of the world of human thought, a prince of that vast ethical aristocracy of free thinkers of all ages who knew no racial or conventional barriers between man and man.

Harris had published a volume of poems which he had dedicated to Lowell, and his most inspiring verse was simply the outpouring of his soul in worship of this ideal man.

He was his devoted worshipper for another and more powerful reason. In his daily intercourse with him in his library during his campaigns he had frequently met his beautiful daughter, and had fallen deeply and madly in love with her. This secret passion he had kept hidden in his sensitive soul. He had worshipped her from afar as though she had been a white-robed angel. To see her and be in the same house with her was all he asked. Now and then he had stood beside the piano and turned the music while she played and sang one of his new pieces, and he would live on that for month, eating his heart out with voiceless yearnings he dared not expose.

In his music he made his greatest success. There was a fiery sweep to his passion, and a deep oriental rhythm in his cadence that held the imagination of his hearers in a spell. It is needless to say it was in this music he breathed his secret love.

At first he had not dared to hope for the day when he could declare this secret or take his place in the list of her admirers and fight for his chance. But of late, a great hope had filled his soul and illumined the world. As he had listened to Lowell's impassioned appeals for human brotherhood, his scathing ridicule of pride and prejudice, and the poetic beauty of the language in which he proclaimed his own emancipation from all the laws of caste, the fiery eloquence with which he trampled upon all the barriers man had erected against his fellow man, his soul was thrilled into ecstasy with the conviction that this scholar and scientific thinker, at least, was a free man. He was sure that he had risen above the limitations of provincialisms, racial or national prejudices.

He had begun to dream of the day he would ask this Godlike man for the privilege of addressing his daughter.

The great meeting at Cooper Union had brought this dream to a sudden resolution. Lowell had outdone himself that night. With merciless invective he had denounced the inhuman barbarism of the South in these lynchings. The sea of eager faces had answered his appeals as water the breath of a storm. He felt its mighty reflex influence sweep back on his soul and lift him to greater heights. He demanded equality of man on every inch of this earth's soil.

"I demand this perfect equality," he cried, "absolutely without reservation or subterfuge, both in form and essential reality. It is the life-blood of Democracy. It is the reason of our existence. Without this we are a living lie, a stench in the nostrils of God and humanity!"

A cheer from a thousand negro throats rent the air as he thus closed. The crowd surged over the platform and for ten minutes it was impossible to restore order or continue the programme. Young Harris pressed his patron's hand and kissed it while tears of pride and gratitude rained down his face.

This speech made a national sensation. It was printed in full in all the partisan papers where it was hoped capital might be made of it for the next political campaign, and the National Campaign Committee of which be was a member ordered a million copies of it printed for distribution among the negroes.

When Lowell and Harris reached Boston, as they parted at the depot Harris said,

"Will you be at home to-morrow, Mr. Lowell?"

"Yes, why?"

"I would like a talk with you in the morning on a matter of grave importance. May I call at nine o'clock?"

"Certainly. Come right into the library. You'll find me there, George."

That night as Lowell walked through his brilliantly lighted home, he felt a sense of glowing pride and strength. With his hands behind him he paced back and forth in his great library and out through the spacious hall with firm tread and flushed face. He felt he could look these great ancestors in the face to-night as they gazed down on him hm their heavy gold frames. They had called him to high ambitions and a strenuous life when his indolence had pleaded for ease and the dilettanteism of a fruitless dreaming. His father had cultivated his artistic tastes, dreamed and done nothing. But these grim-visaged, eagle-eyed ancestors had called him to a life of realities, and he had heard their voices.

Yes, to-night his name was on a million lips. The

door of the United States Senate was opening at his touch and mightier possibilities loomed in the future.

He felt a sense of gratitude for the heritage of that stately old home and its inspiring memories. Its roots struck down into the soil of a thousand years, and spread beneath the ocean to that greater old world life. He felt his heart beat with pride that he was adding new honours to that family history, and adding to the soul-treasures his daughter's children would inherit.

Seated in the library next morning Harris was nervous and embarrassed. He made two or three attempts to begin the subject but turned aside with some unimportant remark.

"Well, George, what is the problem that makes you so grave this morning?" asked Lowell with kindly patronage.

Harris felt that his hour had come, and he must face it. He leaned forward in his chair and looked steadily down at the rug, while he clasped both his hands firmly across his lap and spoke with great rapidity.

"Mr. Lowell, I wish to say to you that you have taught me the greatest faith of life, faith in my fellow man without which there can be no faith in God. What I have suffered as a man as I have come in contact with the brutality with which my race is almost universally treated, God only can ever know.

"The culture I have received has simply multiplied a thousandfold my capacity to suffer. But for the inspiration of your manhood I would have ended my life in the river. In you, I saw a great light. I saw a man really made in the image of God with mind and soul trained, with head erect, scorning the weak prejudices of caste, which dare to call the image of God clean or unclean in passion or pride.

"I lifted up my head and said, one such man redeems

a world from infamy. It's worth while to live in a world honoured by one such man, for he is the prophecy of more to come."

He paused a moment, fidgeted with a piece of paper he had picked up from the table and seemed at a loss for a word.

It never dawned on Lowell what he was driving at. He supposed, as a matter of course, he was referring to his great speeches and was going to ask for some promotion in a governmental department at Washington.

"I'm proud to have been such on inspiration to you, George. You know how much I think of you. What is on your mind?" he asked at length.

"I have hidden it from every human eye, sir, I am afraid to breath it aloud alone. I have only tried to sing it in song in an impersonal way. Your wonderful words of late have emboldened me to speak. It is this—I am madly, desperately in love with your daughter."

Lowell sprang to his feet as though a bolt of lightning had suddenly shot down his backbone. He glared at the negro with wide dilated eyes and heaving breath as though he had been transformed into a leopard or tiger and was about to spring at his throat.

Before answering, and with a gesture commanding silence, he walked rapidly to the library door and closed it.

"And I have come to ask you," continued Harris ignoring his gesture, "if I may pay my addresses to her with your consent."

"Harris, this is crazy nonsense. Such an idea is preposterous. I am amazed that it should ever have entered your head. Let this be the end of it here and now, if you have any desire to retain my friendship."

Lowell said this with a scowl, and an emphasis of indignant rising inflection. The negro seemed stunned by

this swift blow in his very teeth, that seemed to place him outside the pale of a human being.

"Why is such a hope unreasonable, sir, to a man of your scientific mind?"

"It is a question of taste," snapped Lowell.

"Am I not a graduate of the same university with you? Did I not stand as high, and age for age, am I not your equal in culture?"

"Granted. Nevertheless you are a negro, and I do not desire the infusion of your blood in my family."

"But I have more of white than Negro blood, sir."

"So much the worse. It is the mark of shame."

"But it is the one drop of Negro blood at which your taste revolts, is it not?"

"To be frank, it is."

"Why is it an unpardonable sin in me that my ancestors were born under tropic skies where skin and hair were tanned and curled to suit the sun's fierce rays?"

"All tropic races are not negroes, and your race has characteristics apart from accidents of climate that make it unique in the annals of man," rejoined Lowell.

"And yet you demand perfect equality of man with man, absolutely in form and substance without reservation or subterfuge!"

"Yes, political equality."

"Politics is but a secondary phenomenon of society. You said absolute equality," protested Harris.

"The question you broach is a question of taste, and the deeper social instincts of racial purity and self preservation. I care not what your culture, or your genius, or your position, I do not desire, and will not permit, a mixture of Negro blood in my family. The idea is nauseating, and to my daughter it would be repulsive beyond the power of words to express it!"

"And yet," pleaded Harris, "you invited me to your

home, introduced me to your daughter, seated me at your table, and used me in your appeal to your constituents, and now when I dare ask the privilege of seeking her hand in honourable marriage, you, the scholar, patriot, statesman and philosopher of Equality and Democracy, slam the door in my face and tell me that I am a negro! Is this fair or manly?"

"I fail to see its unfairness."

"It is amazing. You are a master of history and sociology. You know as clearly as I do that social intercourse is the only possible pathway to love. And you opened it to me with your own hand. Could I control the beat of my heart? There are some powers within us that are involuntary. You could have prevented my meeting your daughter as an equal. But all the will power of earth could not prevent my loving her, when once I had seen her, and spoken to her. The sound of the human voice, the touch of the human hand in social equality are the divine sacraments that open the mystery of love."

"Social rights are one thing, political rights another," interrupted Lowell.

"I deny it. If you are honest with yourself, you know it is not true. Politics is but a manifestation of society. Society rests on the family. The family is the unit of civilisation. The right to love and wed where one loves is the badge of fellowship in the order of humanity. The man who is denied this right in any society is not a member of it. He is outside any manifestation of its essential life. You had as well talk about the importance of clothes for a dead man, as political rights for such a pariah. You have classed him with the beasts of the field. As a human unit he does not exist for you."

"Harris, it is utterly useless to argue a point like this," Lowell interrupted coldly. "This must be the end of our acquaintance. You must not enter my house again."

"My God, sir, you can't kick me out of your house like this when you brought me to it, and made it an issue of life or death!"

"I tell you again you are crazy. I have brought you here against her wishes. She left the house with her friend this morning to avoid seeing you. Your presence has always been repulsive to her, and with me it has been a political study, not a social pleasure."

"I beg for only a desperate chance to overcome this feeling. Surely a man of your profound learning and genius can not sympathize with such prejudices? Let me try—let her decide the issue."

"I decline to discuss the question any further."

"I can't give up without a struggle!" the negro cried with desperation.

Lowell rose with impatience.

"Now you are getting to be simply a nuisance. To be perfectly plain with you, I haven't the slightest desire that my family with its proud record of a thousand years of history and achievement shall end in this stately old house in a brood of mulatto brats!"

Harris winced and sprang to his feet trembling with passion. "I see," he sneered, "the soul of Simon Legree has at least become the soul of the nation. The South expresses the same luminous truth with a little more clumsy brutality. But their way is after all more merciful. The human body becomes unconscious at the touch of an oil-fed flame in sixty seconds. Your methods are more refined and more hellish in cruelty. You have trained my ears to hear eyes to see, hands to touch and heart to feel, that you might torture with the denial of every cry of body and soul and roast me in the flames of impossible desires for time and eternity!"

"That will do now. There's the door!" thundered Lowell with a gesture of stern emphasis. "I happen to

know the important fact that a man or woman of negro ancestry, though a century removed will suddenly breed back to a pure negro child, thick lipped, kinky headed, flat nosed, black skinned. One drop of your blood in my family could push it backward three thousand years in history. If you were able to win her consent, a thing unthinkable, I would do what old Virginius did in the Roman Forum, kill her with my own hand, rather than see her sink in your arms into the black waters of a Negroid life! Now go!"

9. CHAPTER IX
THE NEW AMERICA

Another year of struggle and suffering, hope and fear, Gaston had passed, and still he was no nearer the dream of realised love. If anything had changed, the General's pride had added new force to his determination that his daughter should not marry the man who had defied him.

His chief reliance for Gaston's defeat was on time, and the broadening of Sallie's mind by extended travel. He had sent her abroad twice, and this year he sent her to spend another three months in Europe.

These absences seemed only to intensify her longing for her lover. On her return the General would burst into a storm of rage at her persistence. She had ceased to give him any bitter answers, only smiling quietly and maintaining an ominous silence.

He had a new cause now of dislike for the man of her choice. Gaston had become a man of acknowledged power in politics and was the leader of a group of radical young men who demanded the complete reorganisation of the Democratic party, the shelving of the old timers, among whom he was numbered, and the announcement of a radical programme upon the Negro issue.

Radicalism of any sort he had always hated. Now, as advanced by this young upstart, it was doubly odious. The General had never given much time to his political duties, but his name was a power and he gave regularly

to the campaign committee the largest cash contribution they received.

He tried in a clumsy way to put Gaston off the State Executive Committee, but failed. He saw Gaston quietly laughing at him. Then he opened his pocket book and worked up a machine. It was a formidable power, and Gaston feared its influence in the coming convention.

While this fight was in progress, and Sallie was in Europe, the destruction of the Maine in Havana harbour stilled the world into silence with the echo of its sullen roar. There was a moment's pause, and the nation lifted its great silk battle flags from the Capitol at Washington, and called for volunteers to wipe the empire of Spain from the map of the Western world.

The war lasted but a hundred days, but in those hundred days was packed the harvest of centuries.

War is always the crisis that flashes the search light into the souls of men and nations, revealing their unknown strength and weakness, and the changes that have been silently wrought in the years of peace.

In these hundred days, statesmen who were giants suddenly shrivelled into pigmies and disappeared from the nation's life. Young men whose names were unknown became leaders of the republic and won immortal fame.

We were afraid that our nation still lacked unity. The world said we were a mob of money-grubbers, and had lost our grasp of principle. The president called for 125,000 men to die for their flag, and next morning 800,000 were struggling for place in the line.

We feared that religion might threaten the future with its bitter feud between the Roman Catholic and Protestant in a great crisis. We saw our Catholic regiments march forth to that war with screaming fife and throbbing drum and the flag of our country above them, going forth to fight an army that had been blessed by the Pope

of Rome. The flag had become the common symbol of eternal justice, and the nation the organ through which all creeds and cults sought for righteousness.

We feared the gulf between the rich and the poor had become impassable, and we saw the millionaire's son take his place in the ranks with the workingman. The first soldier wearing our uniform who fell before Santiago with a Spanish bullet in his breast, was an only son from a palatial home in New York, and by his side lay a cowboy from the West and a ploughboy from the South. Once more we showed the world that classes and clothes are but thin disguises that hide the eternal childhood of the soul.

Sectionalism and disunity had been the most terrible realities in our national history. Our fathers had a poet leader whose soul dreamed a beautiful dream called E Pluribus Unum. But it had remained a dream. New England had threatened secession years before South Carolina in blind rage led the way. The Union was saved by a sacrifice of blood that appalled the world. And still millions feared the South might be false to her plighted honour at Appomattox. The ghost of Secession made and unmade the men and measures of a generation.

Then came the trumpet call that put the South to the test of fire and blood. The world waked next morning to find for the first time in our history the dream of union a living fact. There was no North, no South,—but from the James to the Rio Grande the children of the Confederacy rushed with eager flushed faces to defend the flag their fathers had once fought.

And God reserved in this hour for the South, land of ashes and tombs and tears, the pain and glory of the first offering of life on the altar of the new nation. Our first and only officer who fell dead on the deck of a warship, with the flag above him, was Worth Bagley, of

North Carolina, the son of a Confederate soldier. The gallant youngster who stood on the bridge of the Merrimac, and between two towering mountains of flaming cannon, in the darkness of night blew up his ship and set a new standard of Anglo-Saxon daring, was the son of a Confederate soldier of North Carolina.

The town of Hambright furnished a whole company of eighty-six men, a Captain, three Lieutenants, and a Major, who saw service in the war.

When they were drawn up in the court house square under the old oak, the Preacher stood before them and called the roll from four browned parchments. They were Campbell county Confederate rosters. Every one of the eighty-six men was a child of the Confederacy. And the immortal company F, that was wiped out of existence at the battle of Gettysburg furnished more than half these children.

"Ah, boys, blood will tell!" cried the Preacher, shaking hands with each man as they left.

A single round from the guns, and it was over. The yellow flag of Spain, lit with the sunset splendour of a world empire, faded from the sky of the West.

A new naval power had arisen to disturb the dreams of statesmen. The Oregon, that fierce leviathan of hammered steel had made her mark upon the globe. In a long black trail of smoke and ribbon of foam, she had circled the earth without a pause for breath. The thunder of her lips of steel over the shattered hulks of a European navy proclaimed the advent of a giant democracy that struck terror to the hearts of titled snobs.

He who dreamed this monster of steel, felt her heart beat, saw her rush through foaming seas to victory, before the pick of a miner had struck the ore for her ribs from a mountain side, was a child of the Confederacy—that Confederacy whose desperate genius had sent the

Alabama spinning round the globe in a whirlwind of fire.

America united at last and invincible, waked to the consciousness of her resistless power.

And, most marvellous of all, this hundred days of war had re-united the Anglo-Saxon race. This sudden union of the English speaking people in friendly alliance disturbed the equilibrium of the world, and confirmed the Anglo-Saxon in his title to the primacy of racial sway.

13. CHAPTER XIII
A SPEECH THAT MADE HISTORY

When General Worth received Gaston's brief and startling letter, the wires were hot between New York and Asheville for hours. His last message was a peremptory command to his daughter to join him immediately at Independence.

When Sallie arrived at Oakwood the General was already there, and the storm broke in all its fury. At every bitter word she only quietly smiled, until the General was on the verge of collapse. Day after day he begged, pleaded, raged and finally took to hard swearing as he looked into her calm happy face.

In the meantime McLeod and his henchman on the judge's bench had seen a new light. The excitement over the arrest of Gaston seemed to have fanned the flames of the Red Shirt movement into a conflagration. He was alarmed at its meaning. The judge heard a rumour that five thousand Red Shirts were mobilising at the foot of the Blue Ridge near Hambright, and that they were going to march across the mountains, into Asheville, demolish the jail, liberate Gaston, and hang the judge who had committed him without bail.

The rumour was a fake, but he was not taking any chances. He issued an order releasing Gaston on his own recognisance, and left for a vacation.

Gaston returned to Hambright showered with congratulatory telegrams from every quarter of the state.

He received a brief note from Sallie saying the war was on but had not reached its final climax, as the General was now devoting his best energies to the Democratic convention which was to meet in ten days, when he expected to crush any "fool movement of young upstarts!"

Gaston knew of his organisation but he was sure the number of delegates pledged to the General's machine was not enough to dominate the body, even if he could hold them in line.

When this convention met at Raleigh, no body of representative men were ever more completely at sea as to the platform or policy upon which they would appeal to the people for the overthrow of an enemy. The coalition that conquered the state and held it with the grip of steel for four years was stronger than ever and was absolutely certain of victory. The enormous patronage of the Federal Government had been in their hands for four years, and with the state, county and municipal officers, a host of powerful leaders had been gathered around McLeod's daring personality. Apparently he was about to fasten the rule of the Negro and his allies on the state for a generation.

When Gaston entered the convention hall he received an ovation, heartfelt and generous, but it did not reach the point of a disturbing element in the calculations of the three or four prominent candidates for Governor. General Worth had drilled his cohorts so thoroughly in opposition to him, that any sort of stampeding was out of the question.

The platform committee was composed of seven leaders, among whom was Gaston. There was a long wrangle over the document, and at length when they reported, a sensation was created. For the first time since their triumph over Simon Legree the committee was divided,

and, refusing to agree, submitted majority and minority reports. The committee stood five for the majority and two for the minority.

Gaston and a daring young politician from the heart of the Black Belt signed the minority report. The majority report as submitted, was merely a rehash of the old platform on which they had been defeated by McLeod twice, with slight additional impeachment of the incapacity and corruption of the State Administration. The delegates from the Black Belt and the counties where the Red Shirts had been holding their noonday parades received it with silence. General Worth's machine cheered it vigourously, and gave a rousing reception to their chosen champion who made the presentation speech.

When Gaston rose to offer and defend his minority report, a sudden hush fell on the sea of eager faces. A few men in the convention had heard him speak. All had heard he was an orator of power, and were anxious to see him. His leadership in the Revolution of Independence and his subsequent arrest and imprisonment had made him a famous man.

"Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Convention:" he began with deliberate clear voice which spoke of greater reserve power than the words he uttered conveyed—"I move to substitute for this document of meaningless platitudes the following resolution on which to make this campaign."

You could have heard a pin fall, as in ringing tones like the call of bugle to battle he read,

"Whereas, it is impossible to build a state inside a state of two antagonistic races,

And whereas, the future of North Carolina must therefore be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto,

Resolved, that the hour has now come in our history

to eliminate the Negro from our life and reestablish for all time the government of our fathers."

The delegates from New Hanover, Craven, and Halifax counties, the great centres of the Black Belt, sprang on their seats with a roar of applause that shook the building, and pandemonium broke loose. When one great wave subsided another followed. It was ten minutes before order was restored while Gaston stood calmly surveying the storm.

Just before him sat General Worth, pale and trembling with excitement. The audacity of those resolutions had swept him for a moment off his feet and back into the years of his own daring young manhood. He could not help admiring this challenge of the modern world to stand at the bar of elemental manhood and make good its right to existence. He was about to summon his messengers and rally his lieutenants when Gaston began to speak, and his first words chained his attention.

While the tumult raised by his resolutions was in progress he lifted his eye toward the gallery and there just above him where it curved toward the platform sat his beautiful secret bride. His heart leaped. Her face was aflame with emotion, her eyes flashing with love and pride. She slyly touched with her lips the tip of her finger and blew a kiss across the intervening space. He smiled into her soul a look of gratitude, and with every nerve strung to its highest tension resumed his place by the speaker's stand. When the tumult died away he began a speech that fixed the history of a state for a thousand years.

His resolutions had wrought the crowd to the highest pitch of excitement, and his words, clear, penetrating, and deliberate thrilled his hearers with electrical power.

"Gentlemen:" he said, and the slightest whisper was hushed. "The history of man is a series of great pulse

bears, whose flood overwhelms his future and fixes its life. Like the dammed torrent on a mountain side, it breaks the conservatism that holds it stagnant for generations and floods the world with its sweep. Theories, creeds, and institutions hallowed by age, are cast as rubbish on the scarred hills that mark its course. The old world is buried and a new one appears.

"The Anglo-Saxon is entering the new century with the imperial crown of the ages on his brow and the sceptre of the infinite in his hands.

"The Old South fought against the stars in their courses—the resistless tide of the rising consciousness of Nationality and World-Mission. The young South greets the new era and glories in its manhood. He joins his voice in the cheers of triumph which are ushering in this all-conquering Saxon. Our old men dreamed of local supremacy. We dream of the conquest of the globe. Threads of steel have knit state to state. Steam and electricity have silently transformed the face of the earth, annihilated time and space, and swept the ocean barriers from the path of man. The black steam shuttles of commerce have woven continent to continent.

"We believe that God has raised up our race, as he ordained Israel of old, in this world-crisis to establish and maintain for weaker races, as a trust for civilisation, the principles of civil and religious Liberty and the forms of Constitutional Government.

"In this hour of crisis, our flag has been raised over ten millions of semi-barbaric black men in the foulest slave pen of the Orient. Shall we repeat the farce of '67, reverse the order of nature, and make these black people our rulers? If not, why should the African here, who is not their equal, be allowed to imperil our life?"

A whirlwind of applause shook the building.

"A crisis approaches in the history of the human

race. The world is stirred by its consciousness today. The nation must gird up her loins and show her right to live,—to master the future or be mastered in the struggle. New questions press upon us for solution.

"Shall this grand old commonwealth lag behind and sink into the filth and degradation of a Negroid corruption in this solemn hour of the world?"

"No! No!" screamed a thousand voices.

"What is our condition to-day in the dawn of the twentieth century? If we attempt to move forward we are literally chained to the body of a festering Black Death!

"Fifty of our great counties are again under the heel of the Negro, and the state is in his clutches. Our city governments are debauched by his vote. His insolence threatens our womanhood, and our children are beaten by negro toughs on the way to school while we pay his taxes. Shall we longer tolerate negro inspectors of white schools, and negroes in charge of white institutions? Shall we longer tolerate the arrest of white women by negro officers and their trial before negro magistrates?

"Let the manhood of the Aryan race with its four thousand years of authentic history answer that question!"

With blazing eyes, and voice that rang with the deep peal of defiant power, Gaston hurled that sentence like a thunder bolt into the souls of his two thousand hearers. The surging host sprang to their feet and shouted back an answer that made the earth tremble!

Lifting his hand for silence he continued,

"It is no longer a question of bad government. It is a question of impossible government. We lag behind the age dragging the decaying corpse to which we are chained.

"Who shall deliver us from the body of this death?

"Hear me, men of my race, Norman and Celt, Angle and Saxon, Dane and Frank, Huguenot and German martyr blood!

"The hour has struck when we must rise in our might, break the chains that bind us to this corruption, strike down the Negro as a ruling power, and restore to our children their birthright, which we received, a priceless legacy, from our fathers.

"I believe in God's call to our race to do His work in history. What other races failed to do, you wrought in this continental wilderness, fighting pestilence, hunger, cold, wild beasts, and savage hordes, until out of it all has grown the mightiest nation of the earth.

"Is the Negro worthy to rule over you?

"Ask history. The African has held one fourth of this globe for 3000 years. He has never taken one step in progress or rescued one jungle from the ape and the adder, except as the slave of a superior race.

"In Hayti and San Domingo he rose in servile insurrection and butchered fifty thousand white men, women and children a hundred years ago. He has ruled these beautiful islands since. Did he make progress with the example of Aryan civilisation before him? No. But yesterday we received reports of the discovery of cannibalism in Hayti.

"He has had one hundred years of trial in the Northern states of this Union with every facility of culture and progress, and he has not produced one man who has added a feather's weight to the progress of humanity. In an hour of madness the dominion of the ten great states of the South was given him without a struggle. A saturnalia of infamy followed.

"Shall we return to this? You must answer. The corruption of his presence in our body politic is beyond the power of reckoning. We drove the Carpet-bagger from

our midst, but the Scalawag, our native product, is always with us to fatten on this corruption and breed death to society. The Carpet-bagger was a wolf, the Scalawag is a hyena. The one was a highwayman, the other a sneak.

"So long as the Negro is a factor in our political life, will violence and corruption stain our history. We can not afford longer to play with violence. We must remove the cause.

"Suffrage in America has touched the lowest tide-mud of degradation. If our cities and our Southern civilisation are to be preserved, there must be a return to the sanity of the founders of this Republic.

"A government of the wealth, virtue and intelligence of the community, by the debased and the criminal, is a relapse to elemental barbarism to which no race of freemen can submit.

"Shall the future North Carolinian be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto? That is the question before you.

"Nations are made by men, not by paper constitutions and paper ballots. We are not free because we have a Constitution. We have a Constitution because our pioneer fathers who cleared the wilderness and dared the might of kings, were freemen. It was in their blood, the tutelage of generation on generation beyond the seas, the evolution of centuries of struggle and sacrifice.

"If you can make men out of paper, then it is possible with a scratch of a pen in the hand of a madman to transform by its magic a million slaves into a million kings.

"We grant the Negro the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness if he can be happy without exercising kingship over the Anglo-Saxon race, or dragging us down to his level. But if he can not find happiness except in lording it over a superior race, let him look for

another world in which to rule. There is not room for both of us on this continent!"

Again and again Gaston raised his hand to still the mad tumult of applause his words evoked.

"And we will fight it out on this line, if it takes a hundred years, two hundred, five hundred, or a thousand. It took Spain eight hundred years to expel the Moors. When the time comes the Anglo-Saxon can do in one century what the Spaniard did in eight.

"We have been congratulated on our self-restraint under the awful provocation of the past four years. There is a limit beyond which we dare not go, for at this point, self-restraint becomes pusillanimous and means the loss of manhood."

He then reviewed with thrilling power the history of the state and the proud part played in the development of the Republic. He showed how this border wilderness of North Carolina became the cradle of American Democracy and the typical commonwealth of freemen.

He played with the heart-strings of his hearers in this close personal history as a great master touches the strings of a harp. His voice was now low and quivering with the music of passion, and then soft and caressing. He would swing them from laughter to tears in a single sentence, and in the next, the lightning flash of a fierce invective drove into their hearts its keen blade so suddenly the vast crowd started as one man and winced at its power.

Through it all he was conscious of two blue eyes swimming in tears looking down on him from the gallery.

The crowd now had grown so entranced, and the torrent of his speech so rapid, they forgot to cheer and feared to cheer lest they should lose a word of the next sentence. They hung breathless on every flash of feeling from his face or eloquent gesture.

"I am not talking of a vague theory of constructive dominion," he continued, "when I refer to the Negro supremacy under which our civilisation is being degraded. I use words in their plain meaning. Negro supremacy means the rule of a party in which negroes predominate and that means a Negro oligarchy.

"I call your attention to one typical county of over forty thus degraded, the county of Craven, whose quaint old city was once the Capital of this commonwealth. What are the facts? The negro office-holders of Craven county include a Congressman, a member of the Legislature, a Register of Deeds, the City Attorney, the Coroner, two Deputy Sheriffs, two County Commissioners, a Member of the School Board, three Road Overseers, four Constables, twenty-seven Magistrates, three City Aldermen and four Policemen. There are sixty-two negro officials in this county of 12,000 inhabitants, and their member of the Legislature is a convicted felon. The white people represent ninety-five per cent of the wealth and intelligence of the community, and pay ninety-five per cent of its taxes and are voiceless in its government.

"Would a county in Massachusetts submit to such infamy? No, ten thousand times, no! There is not a county in the North from Maine to California that would submit to it twenty-four hours. Will the children of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill demand such submission now from the children of Washington and Jefferson? No. The passions that obscured reason have subsided. The Anglo-Saxon race is united and has entered upon its world mission.

"We will take from an unprofitable servant the ballot he has abused. To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken may even that which he hath. It is the law of nature. It is the law of God.

"Yes, I confess it," he continued, "I am in a sense narrow and provincial. I love mine own people. Their past is mine, their present mine, their future is a divine trust. I hate the dish water of modern world-citizenship. A shallow cosmopolitanism is the mask of death for the individual. It is the froth of civilisation, as crime is its dregs. Race, and race pride, are the ordinances of life. The true citizen of the world loves his country. His country is a part of God's world.

"So I confess I love my people. I love the South,—the stolid silent South, that for a generation has sneered at paper-made policies, and scorned public opinion. The South, old-fashioned, mediaeval, provincial, worshipping the dead, and raising men rather than making money, family loving, home building, tradition ridden. The South, cruel and cunning when fighting a treacherous foe, with brief volcanic bursts of wrath and vengeance. The South, eloquent, bombastic, romantic, chivalrous, lustful, proud, kind and hospitable. The South with her beautiful women and brave men. The South, generous and reckless, never knowing her own interest, but living her own life in her own way!—Yes, I love her! In my soul are all her sins and virtues. And with it all she is worthy to live.

"The historian tells us that all things pass in time. Wolves whelp and stable in the palaces of dead kings and forgotten civilisations. Memphis, Thebes and Babylon are but names to-day. So New Orleans and New York may perish. African antiquarians may explore their ruins and speculate upon their life; but we may safely fix upon a thousand centuries of intervening time. On your shoulders now rests the burden of civilisation. We must face its responsibilities. For my part, I believe in your future.

"The courage of the Celt, the nobility of the Norman,

the vigour of the Viking, the energy of the Angle, the tenacity of the Saxon, the daring of the Dane, the gallantry of the Gaul, the freedom of the Frank, the earth-hunger of the Roman and the stoicism of the Spartan are all yours by the lineal heritage of blood, from sire and dame through hundreds of generations and through centuries of culture.

"Will you halt now and surrender to a mob of ragged negroes led by white cowards who at the first clash of conflict will hide in sewers?

"I ask you, my people, freemen, North Carolinians, to rise to-day and make good your right to live! The time for platitudes is past. Let us as men face the world and say what we mean.

"This is a white man's government, conceived by white men, and maintained by white men through every year of its history,—and by the God of our Fathers it shall be ruled by white men until the Arch-angel shall call the end of time!

"If this be treason, let them that hear it make the most of it.

"From the eighth day of November we will not submit to Negro dominion another day, another hour, another moment! Back of every ballot is a bayonet, and the red blood of the man who holds it. Let cowards hear, and remember this! Man has never yet voted away his right to a revolution.

"Citizen kings, I call you to the consciousness of your kingship!"

Gaston closed and turned toward his seat, while the crowd hung breathless waiting for his next word. When they realised that he had finished, a rumble like the crash in midheaven of two storms rolled over the surging sea of men, broke against the girders of the roof like the thunder of the Hatteras surf lashed by a hurricane.

Two thousand men went mad. With one common impulse they sprang to their feet screaming, shouting, cheering, shaking each other's hands, crying and laughing. With the sullen roar of crashing thunder another whirlwind of cheers swept the crowd, shook the earth, and pierced the sky with its challenge. Wave after wave of applause swept the building and flung their people, slow to anger, now terrible in wrath, were trembling with the pent-up passion and fury of years.

What power could resist their wrath!

Through it all Gaston sat silent behind the group of the majority of the platform committee, with eyes devouring a beautiful face bending toward him from the gallery. She was softly weeping with love and pride too deep for words.

While the tumult was still raging, before he was conscious of his presence, General Worth's stalwart figure was bending over him, and grasping his hand.

"My boy, I give it up. You have beaten me. I'm proud of you. I forgive everything for that speech. You can have my girl. The date you've fixed for the marriage suits me. Let us forget the past."

Gaston pressed his hand muttering brokenly his thanks, and his soul sank within him at the thought of this proud old iron-willed warrior's anger if he discovered their secret marriage.

The General turned toward the side of the platform; for he had seen the flash of Sallie's dress on the stairs of the balcony leading to the stage. He knew her keen eye had seen his surrender and his heart was hungry for the kiss of reconciliation that would restore their old perfect love.

He met her at the foot of the stairs and she threw her arms impulsively around his neck.

"Oh! Papa, dear! I am the happiest girl in the world. The two men of all men—the only two I love—are mine forever!"

While the applause was still echoing and reechoing over the sea of surging men, and thousands of excited people were crowding the windows from the outside and blocking the streets in every direction clamouring for admittance, a tall man with grey beard and stentorian voice, sprang on the platform. It was General Worth's candidate for Governor. He had not consulted the General but he had an important motion to make. The crowd was stilled at last and his deep voice rang through the building,

"Gentlemen, I move that the minority report offered by Charles Gaston"—again a thunder peal of applause—"be adopted as the platform by acclamation!"

A storm of "ayes" burst from the throats of the delegates in a single breath like the crash of an explosion of dynamite.

"And now that our eyes have seen the glory of the Lord, as we heard His messenger anointed to lead His people, I move that this convention nominate by acclamation for Governor—Charles Gaston!"

Again two thousand men were on their feet shouting, cheering, shaking hands, hugging one another and weeping and yelling like maniacs.

A speech had been made that changed the current of history, and fixed the status of life for millions of people.