“Dat I will. I can do mos’ anyting. You ax yer Ma fur me, en doan let dat nigger Nelse git holt er me.” Charlie’s heart went out to the ragged little waif. He took him by the hand, led him into the yard, found his mother, and begged her to give him a place to sleep and keep him. His mother tried to persuade him to make Dick go back to his own home. Nelse was loud in his objections to the new comer, and Aunt Eve looked at him as though she would throw him over the fence. But Dick stuck doggedly to Charlie’s heels. “Mama dear, see, they tried to cut his head oft with an axe,” cried the boy, and he wheeled Dick around and showed the terrible scar across the back of his neck. “I spec hits er pity dey didn’t cut hit clean off,” muttered Nelse. “Mama, you can’t send him back to be killed!” “Well, darling, I’ll see about it to-morrow.” “Come on Dick, I’ll show you where to sleep!” The next day Dick’s mother was glad to get rid of him by binding him legally to Mrs. Gaston, and a lonely boy found a playmate and partner in work, he was never to forget. CHAPTER XIV--THE NEGRO UPRISING THE summer of 1867! Will ever a Southern man or woman who saw it forget its scenes? A group of oath-bound secret societies, The Union League, The Heroes of America, and The Red Strings dominating society, and marauding bands of negroes armed to the teeth terrorising the country, stealing, burning and murdering. Labour was not only demoralised, it had ceased to exist Depression was universal, farming paralysed, investments dead, and all property insecure. Moral obligations were dropping away from conduct, and a gulf as deep as hell and high as heaven opening between the two races. The negro preachers openly instructed their flocks to take what they needed from their white neighbours. If any man dared prosecute a thief, the answer was a burned barn or a home in ashes. The wildest passions held riot at Washington. The Congress of the United States as a deliberative body under constitutional forms of government no longer existed. The Speaker of the House shook his fist at the President and threatened openly to hang him, and he was arraigned for impeachment for daring to exercise the constitutional functions of his office! The division agents of the Freedman’s Bureau in the South sent to Washington the most alarming reports, declaring a famine imminent. In reply the vindictive leaders levied a tax of fifteen dollars a bale on cotton, plunging thousands of Southern farmers into immediate bankruptcy and giving to India and Egypt the mastery of the cotton markets of the world! Congress became to the desolate South what Attila, the “_Scourge of God_” was to civilised Europe. The Abolitionists of the North, whose conscience was the fire that kindled the Civil War, rose in solemn protest against this insanity. Their protest was drowned in the roar of multitudes maddened by demagogues who were preparing for a political campaign.