The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire

by Jr. Thomas Dixon

He was a candidate for the United States Senate. Delegates were to be elected to-day to the state convention. Unless he could go with a united front from his home county he was doomed.

His opponent, Alexander Larkin, was the boldest, most unscrupulous, and powerful Carpetbag adventurer who had ever entered the South from the slums of the North.

Larkin had made himself the Chairman of the Republican State Executive Committee, and was running neck and neck with the Judge for the Senate. He had determined to break his opponent’s backbone by capturing the whole, or at least a part of the delegates from Butler’s home county. The audacity of this movement had fairly taken the Judge’s breath. He halted Suggs in his thrilling pursuit of Ku Klux evidence and sent him North on an important mission. He meant to be fully prepared for any trick Larkin might spring. Suggs was bustling about among the delegates conscious that he was the trusted lieutenant of the coming man.

The Carpetbagger had so timed his anonymous letter to John Graham that the shadow of disgrace thus thrown over Butler’s name would give him the balance of power. He could not foresee the chain of trivial events which would produce the terrific document John Graham had filed. Every word of its passionate arraignment had the sting of a scorpion, and its effects had been electrical. By instinct the crowd had accepted John’s suit as a blow at the cause and Butler had become their champion.

As the Judge approached the crowd accompanied by Stella and Steve Hoyle, John saw with sinking heart that the first effect of his suit had been to bring Steve and Stella closer together and to dig an impassable gulf between him and the girl he had begun unconsciously to worship. She had evidently laid aside her hatred of politics and become her father’s champion. And he knew that Steve Hoyle had lost no time in this crisis in poisoning her mind forever against him. In fact Steve had spent the morning by her side developing the bitter sentences in his complaint into revelations of hereditary insanity and envenomed malice.

The girl had, however, taken his statements with reservations. She would stand by her father before the world and she would publicly insult John Graham if he ever dared give her the opportunity, but deep down in her heart she half suspected the truth. The memory of the bitter feud between her mother and father over some secret connected with this estate and her father’s shuffling evasions, returned to her now with startling import.

Her mother was of the old regime of the South, an aristocrat of aristocrats to her finger tips. Her people had blotted her very name from their memory for her marriage to Butler. She had fiercely resented to the day of her death this ostracism. The fear that her husband was a scoundrel, which slowly grew into a certainty in later years, at last broke her proud spirit. She gave up the struggle and died.

There were moments in which Stella felt this inherited repugnance to her father when the proud spirit of her mother’s blood ruled in her soul. There were other moments when she felt the necessity of tricks and lies to make life agreeable and accepted her father as of the inevitable order of human existence.

This morning she was her father’s daughter. Whether he was guilty or innocent she would show John Graham and his proud Bourbon set her contempt for them and their opinions.

As the three reached the edge of the crowd she was smiling graciously on Steve in answer to a sally of his cheap wit. She fixed John with a look of contempt and his soul grew sick with the consciousness that he had paid too great a price for his suit against the Judge. In her anger she was superb. The very air about her seemed charged with the intensity of her personality. She radiated it in every direction. It was the consciousness of this intensity of nature which drew John to her with resistless power. No other type of woman could interest him, and Stella was endowed with this subtle magnetism as no human being he had ever met. It spoke in every movement of her body, in every accent of her voice.