The young editor's fists slowly clinched and his breath came in a deep quivering draught. He watched as in a trance. He had seen four years' service in the bloodiest war in history--seen thousands swept into eternity from a single battlefield without a tear. He had witnessed the sufferings of the wounded and dying until it became the routine of a day's work. Yet no event of all that fierce and terrible struggle had stirred his soul as the scene he was now witnessing--not even the tragic end of his father, the editor of the _Daily Eagle_--who had been burned to death in the building when Sherman's army swept the land with fire and sword. The younger man had never referred to this except in a brief, hopeful editorial in the newly christened _Eagle and Phoenix_, which he literally built on the ashes of the old paper. He had no unkind word for General Sherman or his army. It was war, and a soldier knew what that meant. He would have done the same thing under similar conditions. Now he was brushing a tear from his cheek. A reporter at work in the adjoining room watched him curiously. He had never before thought him capable of such an emotion. A brilliant and powerful editor, he had made his paper the one authoritative organ of the white race. In the midst of riot, revolution and counter revolution his voice had the clear ring of a bugle call to battle. There was never a note of hesitation, of uncertainty or of compromise. In the fierce white heat of an unconquered spirit, he had fused the souls of his people as one. At this moment he was the one man hated and feared most by the negroid government in power, the one man most admired and trusted by the white race. And he was young--very young--yet he had lived a life so packed with tragic events no one ever guessed his real age, twenty-four. People took him to be more than thirty and the few threads of gray about his temples, added to the impression of age and dignity. He was not handsome in the conventional sense. His figure was too tall, his cheek bones too high, the nostrils too large and his eyebrows too heavy. His great height, six feet three, invariably made him appear gaunt and serious. Though he had served the entire four years in the Confederate army, entering a private in the ranks at eighteen, emerging a major in command of a shattered regiment at twenty-two, his figure did not convey the impression of military training. He walked easily, with the long, loose stride of the Southener, his shoulders slightly stooped from the habit of incessant reading. He was lifting his broad shoulders now in an ominous way as he folded his clenched fists behind his back and listened to the negro auctioneer. "Come now, gemmens," he went on; "what's de lowes' offer ye gwine ter start me fer dese folks? 'Member, now, de lowes' bid gets 'em, not de highes'! 'Fore de war de black man wuz put on de block an' sole ter de _highes'_ bidder! Times is changed----" "Yas, Lawd!" shouted a negro woman.