"Will you please thank Mr. Wilson for me? What I wanted to talk to you about is the Ku Klux Klan."
"That's a common subject of conversation nowadays. I hear it being discussed everywhere on the streets."
"Mr. Stover called all the men employees of the bank into his office this evening and told them that any one and every one of them who joins the Ku Klux Klan will be discharged."
"Are you sure of that?"
"Yes, I heard two of the men speak of it after the meeting."
"What are Stover's objections to the Klan?"
"I do not know what he told the men, but I have heard him say that it is an organization of outlaws and that it is a great money-making scheme for the promoters. I told him that my grandfather had belonged to the old Ku Klux Klan in Virginia. He said that some good people had been connected with the old order but that this present organization is very different; that it has all of the vices and none of the virtues of the old order."
"He may be right, and then again he may be wrong. There is going to be a public lecture four miles west of town Friday night and I am going to hear a representative of the organization explain it."
"I don't think it will do you any harm to go and hear him, but I want you to promise me that you won't join. I have lots of confidence in Mr. Stover, and he says that when it becomes known that a man belongs to the Klan he will be branded in the community and never will have any standing again. You saw what the editor of the Journal had to say?"
"Yes, but you can't always depend on what you see in a newspaper. Springer may have been sincere in his statement that the organization is a menace to America, but again he may be hired to say that, or he might be misinformed."