Now the negroes demanded the return to the principles of pure Democracy and the right to elect all town, township, and county officers direct. They got their demands. They took charge in short order of the great rich counties in the Black Belt, and white men ceased to hold the offices.
A negro college-graduate from Miss Walker’s classical institution had started a newspaper at Independence noted for its open demands for the recognition of the economic, social and political equality of the races. Young negro men and women walking the streets now refused to give half the sidewalk to a white man or woman when they met, and there were an increasing number of fights from such causes.
Gaston noted these signs with a growing sense of their import, and began his work for the second great campaign. The election for a legislature alone, he knew was lost already. His party had simply abandoned the fight. The Allied Party had passed new election laws, and under the tutelage of the doubtful methods of the past they had taken every partisan advantage possible within the limits of the Constitution. They could not be overthrown short of a political earthquake, and he knew it. But he thought he heard in the depths of the earth the low rumble of its coming, and he began to prepare for it.
CHAPTER II—FACE TO FACE WITH FATE
THREE weeks before Christmas Gaston began to dream of the visit he was to make to Independence to see Sallie Worth. How long it seemed since she had kissed him in the twilight of that Pullman car and the Limited had rolled away bearing her further and further from his life! He would sit now for an hour reading her last letter, looking at her picture on his desk, and dreaming of what she would say when he sat by her side again in her own home.
And then like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky came a tearful letter announcing another storm at home. Her father had again forbidden her to write. She said, at the last, that Gaston’s visit must be postponed indefinitely for the present. He gazed at the letter with a hardened look.
“I will go. I ’ll face General Worth in his own home, and demand his reasons for such treatment. I am a man I am entitled to the respect of a man.” He made this declaration with a quiet force that left no doubt about his doing it.
He wrote Sallie that he could not and would not endure such a fight in the dark with the General, and that he was going to Independence on the day before Christmas as she had planned at first, to have it out with him face to face.