Gutzon was back in Atlanta twenty-four hours after receiving Tucker’s message. A meeting of the executive committee of the Association had been called for the next day. But the sculptor fully believed that his contract would protect him, and he was not so worried as his friends. Virtually everybody else in Atlanta knew what the executive committee was going to do. A full copy of the proceedings of the scheduled meeting, to its climax in a resolution dismissing Gutzon Borglum, had been given in advance to the Atlanta _Journal_ and was in type hours before the committeemen were called to order. The sculptor was met at the station in Atlanta by Tucker, who drove him out to Stone Mountain. Sam Venable was waiting for him there with his sister Mrs. Mason; Mrs. Grace, of Macon, Georgia; and Mrs. Purdue, president of the Atlanta chapter of the U.D.C. The women went up on the scaffolding to view the progress of the work. Word of what was happening in Atlanta took the sculptor completely by surprise. He listened, stunned, to the telephone message that the committee had voted to dismiss him. Quietly he broke the news to the little group about him, then considered the situation. “I shall have to break up the models to protect my design,” he said. The plaster model of Lee’s head had already served its purpose. There was a copy of the Jackson head in Stamford. He ordered these models to be dropped off the platform onto the rocks below. And, finally, he told his man Homer to break up the model in the studio, the one showing Davis on his horse. Mr. Venable said there were tears in his eyes as he took one last look at his work and turned his back. He talked to the U.D.C. women in Mrs. Coribel Venable Orme’s house, urging them to carry on without him. Then suddenly Tucker came bounding in from the road and took him by the arm. “Quick!” Tucker said. “Kiss your wife good-by.” “But where to?” asked Gutzon. “I’ll tell you that afterward,” said Tucker, pulling him toward the door. Shortly they were gone and the people in the house heard a car roaring out the back way on a road from the city that was virtually impassable. The sound had died out and they were well on their way when the local constable arrived and sheepishly produced an order for Gutzon’s arrest on a charge of “malicious mischief.” The complaint declared that the sculptor had destroyed a model valued at $25. Nobody has ever pointed out how the Association directors found out about the smashing of the models within two hours after it happened. The constable didn’t know. He had just been called on to serve it, and, well, if Mr. Borglum had gone away, he couldn’t do that. So he accepted a drink and sat down to enjoy it. Not until long afterward did Mrs. Borglum discover that the head Gutzon was accused of having destroyed was the useless plaster image of Lee.