old and
sadly in need of repair. The teacher was an ex-Confederate officer,
past middle life, well taught by the methods in vogue fifty years
before, but scarcely in harmony with modern ideals of education. In
spite of his perfect manners and unimpeachable character, the
Professor, as he was called, was generally understood to hold his
position more by virtue of his need and his influence than of his
fitness to instruct. He had several young lady assistants who found in
teaching the only career open, in Clarendon, to white women of good
family.

The recess hour arrived while they were still at school. When the
pupils marched out, in orderly array, the colonel, seizing a moment
when Miss Treadwell and the professor were speaking about some of the
children whom the colonel did not know, went to the rear of one of the
schoolrooms and found, without much difficulty, high up on one of the
walls, the faint but still distinguishable outline of a pencil
caricature he had made there thirty years before. If the wall had been
whitewashed in the meantime, the lime had scaled down to the original
plaster. Only the name, which had been written underneath, was
illegible, though he could reconstruct with his mind's eye and the aid
of a few shadowy strokes--"Bill Fetters, Sneak"--in angular letters in
the printed form.

The colonel smiled at this survival of youthful bigotry. Yet even then
his instinct had been a healthy one; his boyish characterisation of
Fetters, schoolboy, was not an inapt description of Fetters,
man--mortgage shark, labour contractor and political boss. Bill,
seeking official favour, had reported to the Professor of that date
some boyish escapade in which his schoolfellows had taken part, and it
was in revenge for this meanness that the colonel had chased him
ignominiously down Main Street and pilloried him upon the schoolhouse
wall. Fetters the man, a Goliath whom no David had yet opposed, had
fastened himself upon a weak and disorganised community, during a
period of great distress and had succeeded by devious ways in making
himself its master. And as the colonel stood looking at the picture he
was conscious of a faint echo of his boyish indignation and sense of
outraged honour. Already Fetters and he had clashed upon the subject
of the cotton mill, and Fetters had retired from the field. If it were
written that they should meet in a life-and-death struggle for the
soul of Clarendon, he would not shirk the con