climb into
the buggy, drive back, step out and re-enter the hotel.

It was yet an hour to train time, and the colonel, to satisfy an
impulse of curiosity, strolled over to the court house, which could be
seen across the square, through the trees. Requesting leave of the
Clerk in the county recorder's office to look at the records of
mortgages, he turned the leaves over and found that a large proportion
of the mortgages recently recorded--among them one on the hotel
property--had been given to Fetters.

The whistle of the train was heard in the distance as the colonel
recrossed the square. Glancing toward the hotel, he saw the landlord
come out, drive across the square to the station, and sit there until
the passengers had alighted. To a drummer with a sample case, he
pointed carelessly across the square to the hotel, but made no
movement to take the baggage; and as the train moved off, the colonel,
looking back, saw him driving back to the hotel.

Fetters had begun to worry the colonel. He had never seen the man, and
yet his influence was everywhere. He seemed to brood over the country
round about like a great vampire bat, sucking the life-blood of the
people. His touch meant blight. As soon as a Fetters mortgage rested
on a place, the property began to run down; for why should the nominal
owner keep up a place which was destined in the end to go to Fetters?
The colonel had heard grewsome tales of Fetters's convict labour
plantation; he had seen the operation of Fetters's cotton-mill, where
white humanity, in its fairest and tenderest form, was stunted and
blighted and destroyed; and he had not forgotten the scene in the
justice's office.

The fighting blood of the old Frenches was stirred. The colonel's
means were abundant; he did not lack the sinews of war. Clarendon
offered a field for profitable investment. He would like to do
something for humanity, something to offset Fetters and his kind, who
were preying upon the weaknesses of the people, enslaving white and
black alike. In a great city, what he could give away would have been
but a slender stream, scarcely felt in the rivers of charity poured
into the ocean of want; and even his considerable wealth would have
made him only a small stockholder in some great aggregation of
capital. In this backward old town, away from the great centres of
commerce, and scarcely feeling their distant pulsebeat, except when
some daring speculator tried for a brief period to co