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 a 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 a bugle to battle he read, “Whereas, it is impossible to build a state inside a state of two antagonistic races, And whereas, the future North Carolinian 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 re毛stablish 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 beats, 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, ............