“The noble order of the Ku Klux Klan don’t handle situations such as this like a mob!” The figures stood expectantly, eagerly waiting to hear what would come next.
“We have listened to the story told by our fellow Klansmen. Hol’ yo’se’ves ready for the call of the Invisible Empire at any minute. We have planned the way to en’ this dastardly plot and to punish those responsible with death!”
“That’s right! Kill ’em! Lynch ’em! Burn th’ bastards!” shouted the crowd.
“That’ll be done till ev’ry one is killed!” promised the Exalted Cyclops. “But it can’t be done so’s it can be laid to our noble order! Already our enemies are charging us with crimes! The Fed’ral Gov’nment will be down on our heads!”
There were cries of “Damn the Gov’nment!” from some of the more hotheaded. But calmer judgment prevailed. Something was to be done, but what that ominous “something” might be, was not revealed. Each man was to be ready for instantaneous duty upon call of the Klan. Immediate action was not wise, for the Klan investigators had not completed their work. Action must wait until that had been done, for it was essential that not one of the plotters should escape.
This last point was emphasized. At last the crowd became more calm with the determination to postpone its vengeance until it was certain of being complete. It then dispersed its several ways, dissolving into separate groups that talked excitedly of the astounding and terrifying news, the need of prompt action, the great luck the white folks had had in discovering the plot so soon, violent denunciation of the Negroes in the plot.
In one of the groups the conversation was different. One of the group was the Exalted Cyclops, in private life Sheriff Bob Parker; another was the Kligrapp, otherwise Henry Lane, Commissioner of Health; the third was the speaker who had revealed the plot, Ed Stewart, Tom Tracy’s landlord.
Sheriff Parker chuckled softly. “Well, Ed, looks like somethin’ is about to break loose, eh?” he observed.
“Yep, I reck’n you’re right. Them damn niggers’ve got a hell of a nerve! Formin’ sassieties to ‘stop robbin’ sharecroppers’! When we get through with ’em, they’ll be formin’ coal-shov’lin’ sassieties in hell!” The other two joined in the laugh at his grim joke. “We’ll put in th’ papers they was formin’ to kill white folks and they’ll never know but what that ain’t true.”
Parker laughed again. Waving his hand at the departing Klansmen, there came to his face a cynical sneer. “An’ them damn fools really think they’re sho’ly goin’ to be murdered by the damn niggers!”
In another section of Central City there was being enacted at the same time another scene of poignant drama that threatened to translate itself into tragedy. The place was a darkened bedroom in the home of Roy Ewing on Georgia Avenue, and the actors in it were four in number. Roy Ewing, owner and manager of the Ewing General Merchandise Store, whom Kenneth had seen but little since Ewing had discontinued his nocturnal visits to Kenneth’s office, was one of the actors. His wife, whose face still bore evidences of a youthful beauty that was fast fading, was a second. A third was old Dr. Bennett, who sat by the bed, his hair dishevelled, his face lined with perplexity and anxiety, as he apprehensively watched the fourth actor in the drama, a girl of nineteen who was restlessly tossing in pain on the bed. Row Ewing stood at the foot of the bed. His wife sat on the other side uttering little snatches of phrases of soothing sympathy which her daughter did not hear.
Dr. Bennett was plainly worried and at a loss what to do to relieve the torture Ewing’s daughter was so clearly experiencing. He turned to Ewing. “Roy, to tell you the truth, it don’t seem like I can find out what’s the matter with Mary. When she had that first attack, I thought she had appendicitis, but she ain’t got no fever to speak of, so it can’t be her appendix that’s botherin’ her. Looks like t’ me she’s got some sort of bleedin’ inside, but I can’t tell.”
Ewing and his wife looked anxiously first at their daughter, then interrogatively and pleadingly at the old physician as he watched the sufferer in her contortions of pain and agony. Mary, married two months and her husband working in Atlanta, had lived with her parents after a short honeymoon. She had her mother’s beauty—that is, the delicate, patrician, statuesque charm that had been her mother’s when Roy Ewing had courted and won her two decades ago in Charleston, South Carolina. It was not the harsh-lined, blonde beauty of Georgia but the fragile old-world, French loveliness of that spot in South Carolina where French tradition and customs and features had not yet been barbarized by the infusion of that Anglo-Saxon blood which is the boast of the South. She lay there, a pitiful sight. Her face was pale, covered with cold, clammy perspiration; all blood had fled from it. She breathed with great difficulty in short and laboured respiratory efforts. Her pulse was failing, very rapid and thready; at times it was barely perceptible. She had been seized with the attack around seven o’clock, when she began vomiting. Now she appeared to be so weakened with the pain she had endured that a state of coma was obviously fast approaching. At least it seemed so. Dr. Bennett tried to revive her, but with little success. The absence of fever puzzled him. He feared an internal haemorrhage—all signs pointed to such a condition—yet he did not know. Roy Ewing and his wife were among his closest friends. He would have tried an operation had they not been. That he feared to risk with their daughter. Yet, what could he
