s wits
and his Greek.

Raising himself to his full stature, the Governor denied the assumed
ghostliness of his interlocutor in these precise words: "Do you not know,
fiend, that I possess the authority to have you shot or hung, and that I
am strongly persuaded to exercise it?"

To which the "fiend" retorted in the following laconism "But how many
suns, O man! would look upon the deed unavenged?" and realizing that they
were quits, the parties to this amusing by-comedy went their respective
ways.

The report of this transaction reaching the public ear via the
sensation-mongers, a few hours later, it was taken up in its amended form
and bandied about the coffee houses and street-corner gatherings until it
finally lost all proportions, and at nine o'clock, precisely, was guilty
of sending an old gentleman to bed, on the outskirts of the city, under
the conviction that Governor Brownlow had been murdered by the Ku-Klux.

But though for twenty hours her streets had flowed with lava tides of that
wild element of which mobs are made, and whatsoever was leonine in her
temperament had been appealed to by rumors of war, that rode past on every
breeze, somewhere in the "wee sma' hours ayont the twal," the last star
had paled in the news' firmament without witnessing anything more tragical
than may be found among the occurrences related in this chapter, and the
tired city slept.

CHAPTER XII.

KU-KLUX HORRORS IN TENNESSEE.

The Klan Outlawed--A Price set upon the Heads of its Membership--A
Rash Act of one of its Dens--Strong Provocations--Negro
Insurrectionists Placed in the Jail at Trenton--Prisoners Wrested
from the County Authorities by Two Hundred Men Disguised as
Ku-Klux--Subsequent Massacre--Detectives in Pursuit--Members of the
Order Indicted--Efforts to Convict the Accused--Failure of
Prosecution--Affair in Obion--Why these Horrors are Classed as Twin
Editions--Description of Madrid Bend--K. K. K. Transactions in this
Remote Quarter--Planters' Jealousy--Message from Mr. J. to the
Leaders of the Party--Cool Treatment it Received--The K.'s Declare
their Intention of Punishing one of the Laborers on J.'s Farm--His
Defiance--Arming the Blacks--A Fierce Skirmish--J.'s Flight--Massacre
of Fleeing Blacks--Eight Colored Men taken from the County Jail at
Troy--Their Fate a Mystery.

In Tennessee, where the Klan took the form of a political party,