“How could his execution be brought about?”
“Ask him the question you put to me.”
“And if he tells?”
“He will forfeit his life.”
Stella’s eyes rested a moment on the chair in which her father fell the night of his death. She turned and gazed into Steve’s face with a strange absent expression in her eyes as though they were seeing a picture which had etched itself in fire on her soul.
“I’m going to cultivate Mr. Graham’s acquaintance,” she slowly said. “I’ll learn from his own lips if he is the leader of the Ku Klux Klan.”
“And if you find that he is?”
“I may hold you to your pledge!”
“And on the day he is executed.”
“I will marry you!”