“Yassah! cose sah! dey tuck hit away fum me and tore it up--dat’s what I fit ’em ’bout--yassah!” John’s face was white with rage. He sent Alfred home, sat down at his desk, and drew out the papers he had laid aside. The Judge had won. He had covered him with infamy in the eyes of his beautiful daughter and had dared to perpetrate this infamous outrage. He couldn’t understand Aunt Julie Ann’s part in the row, but the evidence of Alfred’s plight could not be mistaken.
For three hours with stern set face he worked completing the case of Graham vs. Butler. At four o’clock he had entered the suit and an officer served the papers on the astonished Judge.
JOHN GRAHAM, as leader of the opposition, as well as for personal reasons, was early on the grounds with half a dozen trusted lieutenants to watch the action of the Republican County Convention. He was curious to observe the effects of his suit on the Judge and his followers. He soon discovered that the scathing recital of fraud which he had incorporated into the form of his complaint as published in the morning’s paper was a mistake. It had been accepted by the mottled crew of nondescript politicians and Negroes as proof positive of his own depravity and the Judge’s spotless purity.
The Convention was seated in the open air on improvised boards. The Judge was peculiarly sensitive to the atmosphere of a crowd of Negroes. He had to associate with them to get their votes, but like all poor white men of Southern birth, he hated them without measure.
This Convention of his home county was the most important crisis in the development of his ambitions as the leader of his party in the South.
He was a candidate for the United States Senate. Delegates were to be elected to-day to the state convention. Unless he could go with a united front from his home county he was doomed.
His opponent, Alexander Larkin, was the boldest, most unscrupulous, and powerful Carpetbag adventurer who had ever entered the South from the slums of the North.
Larkin had made himself the Chairman of the Republican State Executive Committee, and was running neck and neck with the Judge for the Senate. He had determined to break his opponent’s backbone by capturing the whole, or at least a part of the delegates from Butler’s home county. The audacity of this movement had fairly taken the Judge’s breath. He halted Suggs in his thrilling pursuit of Ku Klux evidence and sent him North on an important mission. He meant to be fully prepared for any trick Larkin might spring. Suggs was bustling about among the delegates conscious that he was the trusted lieutenant of the coming man.