The Major laughed. "Oh, that was just some of the boys from our settlement. They are simply out for practice. They want to get their hands in, as the saying is. They heard I was coming over, and so they followed along. They don't belong to the Kuklux that you've read so much about. A chap from North Carolina came along t'other day, and told about the Knights of the White Camellia, and the boys thought it would be a good idea to have a bouquet of their own. They have no signs or passwords, but simply a general agreement. You'll have to organise something of that kind here, Tolliver. Oh, you-all are so infernally slow out here in the country! Why, even in Atlanta, they have a Young Men's Democratic Club. You've got to get a move on you. There's no way out of it. The only way to fight the devil is to use his own weapons. The trouble is that some of the hot-headed youngsters want to hold the poor niggers responsible, as I said just now, and the niggers are no more to blame than the chicken in a new-laid egg. Don't forget that, Tolliver. I wouldn't give my old Minervy Ann for a hundred and seventy-five thousand of these white thieves and rascals; and Jerry Tomlin, fool as he is, is more of a gentleman than any of the men who have misled him."
They walked back to the village the way Gabriel had come. On top of the Bermuda hill, Major Perdue paused and looked toward Shady Dale. Lights were still twinkling in some of the houses, but for the most part the town was in darkness.
The Major waved his hand in that direction, remarking, "That's what makes the situation so dangerous, Tolliver—the women and the children. Here, and in hundreds of communities, and in the country places all about, the women and children are in bed asleep, or they are laughing and talking, with only dim ideas of what is going on. It looks to me, my son, as if we were between the devil and the deep blue sea. I, for one, don't believe that there's any danger of a nigger-rising. But look at the other side. I may be wrong; I may be a crazy old fool too fond of the niggers to believe they're really mean at heart. Suppose that such men as this—ah, now I remember!—this Boring—that is what Bridalbin calls himself now—suppose that such men as he were to succeed in what they are trying to do? I don't believe they will, even if we took no steps to prevent it; but then there's the possibility—and we can't afford to take any chances."
Gabriel agreed with all this very heartily. He was glad to feel that his own views were also those of this keen, practical, hard-headed man of the world.
"But men of my sort will be misjudged, Tolliver," pursued the Major; "violent men will get in the saddle, and outrages will be committed, and injustice will be done. Public opinion to the north of us will say that the old fire-eaters, who won't permit even a respectable white man to insult them with impunity—the old slave-drivers—are trying to destroy the coloured race. But you will live, my son, to see some of these same radicals admit that all the injustice and all the wrong is due to the radical policy."
This prophecy came true. Time has abundantly vindicated the Major and those who acted with him.
"Yes, yes," Major Perdue went on musingly, "injustice will be done. The fact is, it has already begun in some quarters. Be switched if it doesn't look like you can't do right without doing wrong somewhere on the road."
Gabriel turned this paradox over in his mind, as they walked along; but it was not until he was a man grown that it straightened itself out in his mind something after this fashion: When a wrong is done the innocent suffer along with the guilty; and the innocent also suffer in its undoing.
Shady Dale woke up the next morning to find the walls and the fences in all public places plastered with placards, or handbills, printed in red ink. The most prominent feature of the typography, however, was not its colour, but the image of a grinning skull and cross-bones. The handbill was in the nature of a proclamation. It was dated "Den No. Ten, Second Moon. Year 21,000 of the Dynasty." It read as follows:
"To all Lovers of Peace and Good Order—Greeting: Whereas, it has come to the knowledge of the Grand Cyclops that evil-minded white men, and deluded freedmen, are engaged in stirring up strife; and whereas it is known that corruption is conspiring with ignorance—