John quickly released the old man, bound his wounds, restored his money and left with his prisoners.
Each of them were given forty lashes and the next morning when Steve Hoyle woke he found six stripe-marked half-naked men gagged and bleeding dangling by their arms from the limbs of the trees on his lawn. Around the neck of each hung a placard: “A warning to the scoundrels who are disgracing the uniform of the Ku Klux Klan in this county.”
CHAPTER X—THE STRENGTH OF THE WEAK
STEVE HOYLE had cut down his men and hustled them out of town before eight o’clock, but the news rapidly spread and had thrown the people into a tremor of wonder as to the meaning of the events of the night. Evidently there had been a clash of forces within the ranks of the Invisible Empire. What did it mean?
Steve had lost no time in explaining to the desperadoes from the hills what they wished to know, and they had left with deep muttered curses against their former Commander-in-chief.
The outrage on Nickaroshinski had aroused the fiercest passions between the friends of John Graham and Steve Hoyle. Excited groups stood on every corner and it was with the utmost difficulty that John succeeded finally in dispersing them without a clash.
At one o’clock Larkin called at the old Graham mansion and announced to Aunt Julie Ann his desire to see the Judge.
“Ye can’t see ’im,” was her contemptuous answer.