CHAPTER XLII
CAPTAIN ALLEN SURRENDERS
The effect of Leech’s return to power was soon visible, and the gloom in the old County was never so deep as it became after that. The failure of Steve’s daring and high-handed step but intensified this. It appeared as if a complete overthrow had come at last.
As is often the case when unexpected failure has come to brilliant and promising plans, popular opinion veered suddenly; and whereas, but a little before, all were full of wonder at Steve Allen’s daring coup, now that it had failed many were inclined to blame him. He ought either to have let the Ku Klux, who, it was understood, had tried to get hold of Leech, deal with him, or else have let him alone. Now he had but intensified his malice, as was shown by the rancor with which he was pushing the prosecutions. He had given Leech a national reputation, and increased his power to do harm.
Captain Allen was deeply offended by some of the things said about him by certain of the members of the secret society, and he met them with fierce denunciation of the whole order. It was, he said, no longer the old organization which, he asserted, had acted for the public good, and with a high purpose. That had ceased to exist. This was a cowardly body of cut-throats, who rode about the country under cover of darkness, perpetrating all sorts of outrages and villainies for purposes of private vengeance. He gave them to understand clearly that he was not afraid of them, and denounced and defied the whole gang.
But one thing Steve could not meet so well. He could not meet the charge that his wild and reckless act in carrying Leech off had, in the sequel, done harm, and had intensified the hostility shown to the old County, and increased the rigor with which the citizens were treated. Even the friends who adhered stoutly to him were forced to admit that, as it turned out, his carrying Leech off was unfortunate. The downcast looks and the gloom that appeared everywhere told him how deeply the people were suffering. Another thing stuck deeper in his heart. He was at liberty and his friends in prison. Jacquelin was in prison under indictment when he had taken his place, and but for him would be a free man.
Steve had thought at times of leaving the State and going West. Rupert’s career there showed what might be accomplished. But this idea passed away now in the stress of the present crisis. He would not leave the State in the hour of her darkness. He could not leave his friends. It would be desertion.
Another cause of anxiety began to make itself apparent to Captain Allen about the same time. He knew, as the reader knows, that Captain Aurelius Thurston had long been an ardent, if a somewhat intermittent, suitor of Miss Welch; though his information was derived, not from the cold statement of the chronicler, but through those intuitions with which a lover appears to be endowed for his self-torture as well as for his security. Miss Ruth, it is true, had denied the charge, made from time to time, respecting Captain Thurston; but we know that these denials are frequently far short of satisfying a lover’s jealousy. And it must be confessed that she had never taken the trouble to state to Captain Allen the explicit and somewhat decisive conditions under which she had consented to continue the friendship.