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 not a cabin in all that

in that crowd, but there was county that would not have given shelter to the 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,

66

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.

66

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.

T

CHAPTER VI

THE BLACK PERIL

HE 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

J

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 AngloSaxon 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 re

flected 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