CHAPTER XIV—THE RED SHIRTS

AS soon as Gaston could leave the throngs of friends who were congratulating him on his remarkable speech and his certainty of election, he hastened to find Sallie.

“My lover, my king!” she cried impulsively as he clasped her in his arms.

“Your eyes kindled the fire in my soul and gave me the power to mould that crowd to my will!” he softly told her.

“It is sweet to hear you say that!”

“‘Now, my love, we are in an awful situation. What are we to do with the General storming around preparing for a grand wedding? What if that jailer gives out the news? McLeod can get it out of him if he ever suspects anything.”

“Don’t worry, dear. I ’ll manage everything. We’ve fixed the wedding on the Inauguration day—so you can’t be defeated. We will be busy day and night getting ready my trousseau, and issuing our invitations. Papa will never dream that one ceremony has been performed already. He need never know it until we are ready to tell him.”

“If he discovers it, he will swear I have tried to humiliate him, and he will never forgive it. Telegraph me if anything happens, and I will come immediately. I can’t see you for weeks in the campaign, but I will write to you every day.”

“His Excellency, the Governor of North Carolina!” she softly exclaimed with a dreamy look into his face. “My lover!”

“Don’t make me vain. I may be the Governor, but I shall always be the slave of a beautiful woman who came one day to a jail and made it a palace with the glory of her love!”

“I’m glad I didn’t wait for your success.”





The campaign which followed was the most remarkable ever conducted in the history of an American commonwealth. In the dawn of the twentieth century, a resistless movement was inaugurated to destroy the party in control of a state, and affiliated with the most powerful National Administration since Andrew Jackson’s, on the open declaration of their intention to nullify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the Republic.

There was no violence except the calm demonstration in open daylight of omnipotent racial power, and the defiance of any foe to lift a hand in protest.

When Gaston spoke at Independence, five thousand white men dressed in scarlet shirts rode silently through the streets in solemn parade, and six thousand negroes watched them with fear. There was no cheering or demonstration of any kind. The silence of the procession gave it the import of a religious rite. A thousand picked men were in line from Hambright and Campbell county and they formed the guard of honour for their candidate for Governor.

Like scenes were enacted everywhere. Again the Anglo-Saxon race was fused into a solid mass. The result was a foregone conclusion.