"I think I know the young gentleman who made that and he may give me trouble."
He thrust the thing into a drawer, seized his hat, strolled down a side street and slowly passed the cabinet shop of the workman whom he suspected. It was closed. Evidently the master had business outside. It was barely possible, of course, that he had gone to the galleries of the Capitol to hear the long-expected message of the Governor against the Klan. The galleries had been packed for the past two sessions in anticipation of this threatened message. The Capital city was only a town of five thousand white inhabitants and four thousand blacks. Rumors of impending political movements flew from house to house with the swiftness of village gossip.
He walked to the Capitol building by a quiet street. As he passed through the echoing corridor the rotund figure of Schlitz, the Carpetbagger, leader of the House of Representatives, emerged from the Governor's office.
The red face flushed a purple hue as his eye rested on his arch-enemy of the Eagle and Phoenix. He tried to smile and nodded to Norton. His smile was answered by a cold stare and a quickened step.
Schlitz had been a teamster's scullion in the Union Army. He was not even an army cook, but a servant of servants. He was now the master of the Legislature of a great Southern state and controlled its black, ignorant members with a snap of his bloated fingers. There was but one man Norton loathed with greater intensity and that was the shrewd little Scalawag Governor, the native traitor who had betrayed his people to win office. A conference of these two cronies was always an ill omen for the state.
He hurried up the winding stairs, pushed his way into a corner of the crowded galleries from which he could see every face and searched in vain for his young workman.
He stood for a moment, looked down on the floor of the House and watched a Black Parliament at work making laws to govern the children of the men who had created the Republic—watched them through fetid smoke, the vapors of stale whiskey and the deafening roar of half-drunken brutes as they voted millions in taxes, their leaders had already stolen.
The red blood rushed to his cheeks and the big veins on his slender swarthy neck stood out for a moment like drawn cords.
He hurried down to the Court House Square, walked with long, leisurely stride through the thinning crowds, and paused before a vacant lot on the opposite side of the street. A dozen or more horses were still tied to the racks provided for the accommodation of countrymen.
"Funny," he muttered, "farmers start home before sundown, and it's dusk—I wonder if it's possible!"