“Poor old fellow, I’m afraid he’s gone crazy!” exclaimed the Preacher. He hurried to the cemetery. There he found Tom at the newly made grave. He had worked through the night and dug the grave open with his bare hands and pulled the coffin up out of the ground. He had broken his finger nails all off trying to open it and his fingers were bleeding. At last he had given up the effort to open the coffin, sat down beside it, and was arranging her toys he had made for her beside the box. He had brought a lot of her clothes, a pair of little shoes and stockings, and a bonnet, and he had placed these out carefully on top of the lid. He was talking to her. The Preacher lifted him gently and led him away, a hopeless madman. CHAPTER VI--THE BLACK PERIL THE longer Gaston pondered over the tragic events of that lynching the more sinister and terrible became its meaning, and the deeper he was plunged in melancholy. Beyond all doubt, within his own memory, since the negroes under Legree’s lead had drawn the colour line in politics, the races had been drifting steadily apart. The gulf was now impassable. Such crimes as Dick had committed, and for which he had paid such an awful penalty, were unknown absolutely under slavery, and were unknown for two years after the war. Their first appearance was under Legree’s regime. Now scarcely a day passed in the South without the record of such an atrocity, swiftly followed by a lynching, and lynching thus had become a habit for all grave crimes. Since McLeod’s triumph in the state such crimes had increased with alarming rapidity. The encroachments of negroes upon public offices had been slow but resistless. Now there were nine hundred and fifty negro magistrates in the state elected for no reason except the colour of their skin. Feeling themselves intrenched behind state and Federal power, the insolence of a class of young negro men was becoming more and more intolerable. What would happen to these fools when once they roused that thousand-legged, thousand-eyed beast with its ten thousand teeth and nails! He had looked into its face, and he shuddered to recall the hour. He knew that this power of racial fury of the Anglo-Saxon when aroused was resistless, and that it would sweep its victims before its wrath like chaff before a whirlwind. And then he thought of the day fast coming when culture and wealth would give the African the courage of conscious strength and he would answer that soul piercing shriek of his kindred for help, and that other thousand-legged beast, now crouching in the shadows, would meet thousand-legged beast around that beacon fire of a Godless revenge! More and more the impossible position of the Negro in America came home to his mind. He was fast being overwhelmed with the conviction that sooner or later we must squarely face the fact that two such races, counting millions in numbers, can not live together under a Democracy.