daily hearers were silent, but
resolute. They did not analyze. Their motives were their feelings; their
feelings were their traditions, and their traditions were back in the
old entrenchments. The time for large changes had slipped by. Haggard,
of the _Courier_, thought it "Equally just and damning" to reprint from
the General's odiously remembered letter of four years earlier, "If we
can't make our Negroes white, let us make them as white as we can," and
sign it "Social Equality Launcelot." Parson Tombs, sweet, aged, and
beloved, prayed from his pulpit--with the preface, "Thou knowest thy
servant has never mixed up politics and religion"--that "the
machinations of them who seek to join together what God hath put asunder
may come to naught."

Halliday laughed. "Why, I'm only a private citizen trying to retrieve my
private fortunes." But--

"These are times when a man can't choose whether he'll be public or
private!" said Garnet, and the _Courier_ made the bankrupt cotton factor
public every day. It quoted constantly from the unpardonable letter, and
charged him with "inflaming the basest cupidity of our Helots," and so
on, and on. But the General, with his silver-shot curls dancing half-way
down his shoulders, a six-shooter under each skirt of his black velvet
coat, and a knife down the back of his neck, went on pushing his private
enterprise.

"Private enterprise!" cried Garnet. "His jackals will run him for
Congress." And they did--against Garnet.

The times were seething. Halliday, viewing matters impartially in the
clear, calm light of petroleum torches, justified Congress in acts which
Garnet termed "the spume of an insane revenge;" while Garnet, with equal
calmness of judgment, under other petroleum torches, gloried in the
"masterly inactivity" of Dixie's whitest and best--which Launcelot
denounced as a foolish and wicked political strike. All the corruptions
bred by both sides in a gigantic war--and before it in all the crudeness
of the country's first century--were pouring down and spouting up upon
Dixie their rain of pitch and ashes. Negroes swarmed about the polls,
elbowed their masters, and challenged their votes. Ragged negresses
talked loudly along the sidewalk of one another as "ladies," and of
their mistresses as "women." White men of fortune and station were
masking, night-riding, whipping and killing; and blue cavalry rattled
again through the rocky streets of Suez.

Such was life when dashing Fan