STEVE HOYLE had called early at the Judge's to see Stella the morning after John's encounter in the hall. As he paced restlessly back and forth waiting the return of Stella's maid, he was evidently in an ugly humour.

When he heard the story at the hotel late the night before, that his hated rival in politics and society had dared to venture into Judge Butler's home, he could not believe it. And the idea that Stella should receive him had cut his vanity to the quick.

The richest young man in the county, he aspired to be the most popular, and he had long enjoyed the distinction in the estimation of his friends of being the handsomest man in his section of the state. In his own estimation there had never been any question about this. And beyond a doubt he was a magnificent animal. Six feet tall, a superb figure, somewhat coarse and heavy in the neck, with smooth, regular features. He was slightly given to fat, but his complexion was red and clean as a boy's, and he might well be pardoned his vanity when one remembered his money.

His father, the elder Hoyle, who had avoided service in the war by hiring a substitute, had emerged from the tragedy far wealthier than when he entered it. Some people hinted that if the Treasury Agents, who had stolen the cotton of the country under the absurd and infamous Confiscation Act of Congress, would speak, they might explain this fortune. They had never spoken. The old fox had been too clever and his tracks were all covered.

Steve had recently met Stella at one of her school receptions in Washington while on business for his father, yielded instantly to her spell, and they were engaged. He felt that he had condescended to honour the Judge by marrying into his family.

Butler never had been a slave owner, and in spite of his fawning ambitions as a turncoat politician and social aspirant, he was still poor—so poor in fact that he could scarcely keep up appearances in the Graham mansion. Steve planned to live there after his marriage in a style befitting his wealth and social position. He noted the faded covering on the old mahogany furniture and determined to make it shine with new plush on his advent as master.

TRUE to his word Butler called for a regiment of United States troops.

On the second day after his interview with the Judge, John Graham watched from his office window the blue coats march through the streets of Independence to their camp.

He turned to his chair beside a quaint old mahogany desk and wrote an official order to each of the eight district chiefs of the Invisible Empire who were under his command in the state.

When he had finished his task he sat for an hour in silence staring out of his window and seeing nothing save the big brown eyes of a beautiful girl—eyes of extraordinary size and brilliance that seemed to be searching the depths of his soul. It was a new and startling experience in his life. He had made love harmlessly after the gallant fashion of his race to many girls; yet none of them had found the man within.

He was angry with himself now for his inability to shake off the impression Stella Butler had made. He hated her very name. The idea of his ever seeking the hand of a Butler in marriage made him shiver. To even meet her socially with such a father was unthinkable. And yet he kept thinking.

Two things especially about her haunted him with persistence and had thrown a spell over his imagination—the strange appealing tenderness of her eyes and the marvellous low notes of her voice, a voice at once musical, and warm with slumbering passion. Her voice seemed the echo of ravishing music he had heard somewhere, or dreamed or caught in another world he fancied sometimes his soul had inhabited before reaching this. Never had he heard a voice so full of feeling, so soft, so seductive, so full of tender appeal. Its every accent seemed to caress.

He cursed himself for brooding over her and then came back to his brooding with the certainty of fate. Yet it should make no difference in his fight with old Butler. He would kick that fawning, creeping scoundrel out of his house if it was the last and only thing he ever accomplished on earth. The only question he still debated was the time and method of the execution of his plan.

One thing became more and more clear—he was going to need the full use of every faculty with which God had endowed him and he must set his house in order.

JOHN GRAHAM walked briskly to his office the next morning at a quarter to ten, and found Dan Wiley standing at the door.

The lank mountaineer merely nodded, followed the young lawyer into the office, and stood in silence watching him as he opened a case of duelling pistols which had been handed down through four generations of his family.

“Don't do it,” said Dan abruptly.

“I've got to.”

“Ain't no sense in it.”

“It's the only way, Dan, and I'm going to ask you to be my second.”

Dan placed his big rough hand on the younger man's shoulders.

“Lemme be fust, not second.”

“It's not my way!”

“That's why I'm axin ye. You're the biggest man in the state! I seed it last night as ye stood there makin' that speech to the boys. You'll be the Governor if ye don't do some fool thing like this. If ye fight 'im, an' he kills ye, your'e a goner. If you kill him, you're ruined—what's the use?”

“It can't be helped,” was the quiet answer.

“Are ye goin' ter kill 'im?”

“Yes. The Klan was the only way to save our civilisation. I've sowed the wind and now I begin to see that somebody must reap the whirlwind. I realised it all in a flash last night when that scoundrel called the men to reorganise.”

“They won't follow him.”

“The fools will, and there are thousands outside clamouring to get in. I've kept the young and reckless out as far as possible. Steve Hoyle knows that he can beat me for Congress with this new wildcat Klan at his back. He hasn't sense enough to see that the spell of authority once broken, he wields a power no human hand can control. It will be faction against faction, neighbour against neighbour, man against man—the end martial law, prison bars and the shadow of the gallows. I can save the lives of thousands of men, and my state from crime and disgrace by killing this fool as I'd kill a mad dog, and I'm going to do it!”

“Hit'll ruin ye, boy!”

“I know it.”

“Look here, John Graham, do me a special favour. Leave Steve to me. My wife's dead and I aint got a chick or a child—you've defended me without a cent and you're the best friend I've got in the world. It's my turn now. Nobody would miss me.”

“I'd miss you, Dan!” said John slowly.

The two men silently clasped hands and looked into each other's faces.

“You're a fool to do this, boy”—the mountaineer's voice broke.

“Of course, Dan, many of our old-fashioned ways are foolish but at least they hold the honour of man, and the virtue of woman dearer than human life!”

A boy suddenly opened the door without knocking and handed John a note.

He read it aloud with a scowl:

“Now, by gum, you'll have to leave 'im to me,” laughed the mountaineer.

John tore the note into bits and turned to the boy:

“No answer, you can go.”

“He'll pick you off some night from behind a tree,” warned Dan.

“Sneak and coward!” muttered John.

WHEN Dan Wiley closed the door John turned to his desk and drew from a pigeon hole the mass of legal papers containing the evidence he had gathered of Butler's theft of his estate.

The dissolution of the Klan had left him only the process of the law by which to recover it. Yet it was only a question of time when the decision of the Supreme Court would hurl the Judge from the Graham home and arraign him for impeachment.

Now that he was ready to file the suit, his mind was in a tumult of hesitation. The soft invisible hand of a girl was holding his hand. He gazed steadily at the documents and saw nothing that was within. The ink lines slowly resolved themselves into the raven glossy hair of Stella piled in curling confusion above her white forehead, and he was trying in vain to find the depths of her wonderful eyes.

Something in the expression of those eyes held his memory in a perpetual spell—their remarkable size and their dilation when she spoke. They seemed to enfold him in a soft mantle of light.

He suddenly bundled the papers, replaced them, and took up his pen.

“I've got to see her—that's all!” he exclaimed. “Who knows? Perhaps I'm answering the great summons of life. I'll put it to the test. At least I'll not throw my chance away for a house, some trees and a few acres of dirt. When Love calls life's too short for revenge.”

On a sheet of delicate old note paper with a crest of yellow and black at the top, he wrote:

“Unless I've mistaken her character, she'll see me!” he mused as he sealed the note.

He went at once to Mrs. Wilson's, found Alfred, and gave him the missive.

“Take that to the Judge's and give it to Miss Stella.”

JOHN GRAHAM, as leader of the opposition, as well as for personal reasons, was early on the grounds with half a dozen trusted lieutenants to watch the action of the Republican County Convention. He was curious to observe the effects of his suit on the Judge and his followers. He soon discovered that the scathing recital of fraud which he had incorporated into the form of his complaint as published in the morning's paper was a mistake. It had been accepted by the mottled crew of nondescript politicians and Negroes as proof positive of his own depravity and the Judge's spotless purity.

The Convention was seated in the open air on improvised boards. The Judge was peculiarly sensitive to the atmosphere of a crowd of Negroes. He had to associate with them to get their votes, but like all poor white men of Southern birth, he hated them without measure.

This Convention of his home county was the most important crisis in the development of his ambitions as the leader of his party in the South. He was a candidate for the United States Senate. Delegates were to be elected to-day to the state convention. Unless he could go with a united front from his home county he was doomed.

His opponent, Alexander Larkin, was the boldest, most unscrupulous, and powerful Carpetbag adventurer who had ever entered the South from the slums of the North.

Larkin had made himself the Chairman of the Republican State Executive Committee, and was running neck and neck with the Judge for the Senate. He had determined to break his opponent's backbone by capturing the whole, or at least a part of the delegates from Butler's home county. The audacity of this movement had fairly taken the Judge's breath. He halted Suggs in his thrilling pursuit of Ku Klux evidence and sent him North on an important mission. He meant to be fully prepared for any trick Larkin might spring. Suggs was bustling about among the delegates conscious that he was the trusted lieutenant of the coming man.

The Carpetbagger had so timed his anonymous letter to John Graham that the shadow of disgrace thus thrown over Butler's name would give him the balance of power. He could not foresee the chain of trivial events which would produce the terrific document John Graham had filed. Every word of its passionate arraignment had the sting of a scorpion, and its effects had been electrical. By instinct the crowd had accepted John's suit as a blow at the cause and Butler had become their champion.

As the Judge approached the crowd accompanied by Stella and Steve Hoyle, John saw with sinking heart that the first effect of his suit had been to bring Steve and Stella closer together and to dig an impassable gulf between him and the girl he had begun unconsciously to worship. She had evidently laid aside her hatred of politics and become her father's champion. And he knew that Steve Hoyle had lost no time in this crisis in poisoning her mind forever against him. In fact Steve had spent the morning by her side developing the bitter sentences in his complaint into revelations of hereditary insanity and envenomed malice.

The girl had, however, taken his statements with reservations. She would stand by her father before the world and she would publicly insult John Graham if he ever dared give her the opportunity, but deep down in her heart she half suspected the truth. The memory of the bitter feud between her mother and father over some secret connected with this estate and her father's shuffling evasions, returned to her now with startling import.