"Complications—what do you mean?"
"The President, who has been intensely hostile to Davis, realizes that his own term of office and possibly his life are now at stake. He has broken with the Radicals who control Congress, old Thaddeus Stevens's at their head. Stevens lives in Washington in brazen defiance of conventionalities with a negro woman whom he separated from her husband thirty odd years ago. Under the influence of this negress he has introduced a bill into the House of Representatives to confiscate the remaining property of the white people of the South and give it to the negroes—dividing the land into plots of forty acres each. He proposes also to disfranchise the whites of the Southern States, enfranchise the negroes, destroy the State lines and erect on their ruins territories ruled by negroes whom his faction can control.
"Johnson the President, a Southern born white man, has already informed the Radicals that he will fight this programme to the last ditch. Stevens' answer was characteristic of the imperious old leader. 'Let him dare! I'll impeach Andrew Johnson, remove him from office and hang him from the balcony of the White House.'
"The President realizes that the Bureau of Military Justice which he allowed Holt to create may be used as the engine of his own destruction. They have already taken the first steps to impeach him—"
"Then he'll never dare allow another case to be tried before that Bureau—" O'Connor interrupted.
"It remains to be seen. He is afraid of both Stanton and Holt. The Bureau of Military Justice is their hobby."
O'Connor sprang to his feet.
"We must smash it by an appeal to the people. Their sense of justice is yet the salt that will save the Nation. The key to the situation is in the character of the remarkable witnesses whom Holt has produced before this tribunal of assassination. In my judgment they are a gang of hired perjurers. Their leader is a fellow named Conover. There are five men associated with him. They used these witnesses against Mrs. Surratt. They used them against Wirz. They are preparing to use them against Davis. It is inconceivable that these plugs from the gutters of New York could have really stumbled on the facts to which they have sworn. Find who these men are. Get their records to the last hour of the day you track them—and report to me."
Socola organized a force of detectives and set them to work. The task was a difficult one. He found that Conover and his pals were protected by the unlimited power of the National Government.