the resignation of every city and county officer was in his hand, and the Mayor and Chief of Police were at his feet begging for mercy.

He posted a notice over the county warning every negro and white associate that no further insolence or criminality would be tolerated.

The county and municipal election was but three days off and there was but one ticket on the field. When the white men elected were sworn in, the guards went to the woods and told the terrified and half starving negroes they could return to their homes, a competent police force was organised, and the volunteer organisation disbanded. Negro refugees and their associates once more filled the ear of the national government with clamour for the return of the army to the South to uphold Negro power, but for the first time since 1867, it fell on deaf ears. The Anglo-Saxon race had been reunited. The Negro was no longer the ward of the Republic. Henceforth, he must stand or fall on his own worth and pass under the law of the survival of the fittest.

This event made a tremendous impression on the imagination of the people. It increased the popularity and power of Gaston, its intended victim.

The General was more than ever determined to destroy Gaston's power in the convention which was to meet in a few weeks. He had his candidate for Governor well groomed and he had captured the largest number of pledged delegates. There were three other candidates, but none of them apparently were backed by Gaston. The General was puzzled at his methods, and failed to discover his programme, though he spent money with liberality and exhausted every resource at his command.

A strange thing had occurred that had upset all calculations. Beginning at Independence a race fire had broken into resistless fury and was sweeping along the

line of all the counties on the South Carolina border and over the entire state with incredible rapidity. Everywhere, the white men were arming themselves and parading the streets and public roads in cavalry order dressed in scarlet shirts. This Red Shirt movement was a spontaneous combustion of inflammable racial power that had been accumulating for a generation.

The Democratic Executive Committee was called together in haste and made the most frantic efforts to stop it. But there was no head to it. It had no organisation except a local one, and it spread by a spark flying from one county to another.

McLeod laughed at the address of the Democratic Committee and swore Gaston was the organiser of the movement. He determined to nip it in the bud by putting Gaston under a cloud that would destroy his influence. He did not dare to attack him for his part in the Revolution at Independence. He preferred to belittle that affair as a local disturbance.

But at an election for Congressman to fill a vacancy, the Democratic candidate had won by a narrow margin in a campaign of great bitterness under Gaston's leadership.

Charges of fraud were freely made on both sides. McLeod determined to utilise these charges, and by producing perjured witnesses before a packed court, place Gaston in jail without bail until the convention had met.

He had every advantage in such a conspiracy. The United States judge whom he intended to utilise was a creature of his own making, a trickster whose confirmation had been twice defeated in the Senate by the members of his own party on his shady record. But he had won the place at last by hook and crook, and McLeod owned him body and soul.

Accordingly Gaston was arrested with a warrant Mc

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Leod had obtained from his judge, arraigned before him and committed without bail. He was charged with a felony under the election laws, taken to Asheville and placed in jail.

The audacity of this arrest and the vehemence with which McLeod pressed his charges created a profound sensation in the state. It was rumoured that the graver charge of murder lay back of the charge of felony and would be pressed in due time. A murder had been comImitted in the district during the exciting campaign and no clue had ever been found to its perpetrator. McLeod knew he had no evidence connecting Gaston with this event, but he knew that he had henchmen who would swear to any thing he told them and stick to it.

A

CHAPTER XI

THE HEART OF A WOMAN

WEEK after Gaston's imprisonment Sallie Worth arrived in New York from her last trip abroad. She had cut her trip short and cabled her father of her return.

She was in an agony of suspense and uncertainty about her lover. Gaston's letters had failed to reach her for a month by reason of the war which had demoralised the mail service. Her own letters had failed to reach Gaston for a similar reason.

The General hastened to New York to meet his wife and daughter and persuade Sallie to remain in the North until December. He was hopeful now that her long absence and Gaston's absorption in politics, his bitter opposition to him personally, and the cloud under which he rested in prison, would be the final forces that would give him the victory in the long conflict he had waged for the mastery of his daughter's heart.

Before informing Sallie of the stirring events at Independence and the part Gaston had taken in them, or allowing her to learn of his imprisonment, the General sought to find the exact state of her mind.

"I trust, Sallie," he began, "you are recovering from your infatuation for this man. You know how dearly I love you. I have never taken a step in life since I looked into your baby face that wasn't for you and your happiness.'

She only looked at him wistfully and her eyes seemed to be dreaming.

"I want you to have some pride. Gaston has attempted to kick me out of the councils of the party, and become the dictator of the state. His course is one of violence and radicalism. I regard him as a dangerous man, and I want you to have nothing to do with him."

She was gravely silent.

"Do you believe he has been faithfully dreaming of you in your absence?" asked the General.

"Yes, I do!"

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Then let me disabuse your mind. It is not the way of strong men. He is absolutely absorbed in a desperate political struggle in which his personal ambitions are first. I have seen him paying the most devoted attentions to the daughter of our rival down east, whose influence he wants, and it is rumoured among his friends that he has proposed to her."

"Who told you that?" she asked impetuously.

"I had it first from Allan, but I've heard it since from others."

"I do not believe a word of it," she declared. "That's because you're a woman and hold such silly ideals. I tell you, he wants you only because he knows you are rich, and he wishes to brow-beat me. Such a man will try to whip you before you have been his wife five years. I know that kind of man. Why can't you trust my judgment?"

"I had rather trust my heart's intuitions, Papa. I can not be deceived in such a question."

“Well, you are being deceived. He is anything but a languishing lover. At present he is a political tiger at bay. Unless you hold him to you by some pledge he has given, he will forget you, and marry another in two years. I am a man and I know men. I thought I was desperately