Remained in all its intactness--its beauty--its well equipped barns with all the splendor of its former days. For so great was the respect of Schofield's army for the character of Colonel Jeremiah Travis that his home escaped the torch when it was applied to many others in the Tennessee Valley. And Richard Travis had been shrewd enough after the war to hold his own. Joining the party of the negro after the war, he had been its political ruler in the county. And the Honorable Richard Travis had been offered anything he wanted. At present he was State Senator. He with others called himself a Republican--one of the great party of Lincoln to which the negroes after their enfranchisement united themselves. It was a fearful misnomer. The Republican party in the South, composed of ninety-nine ignorant negroes to one renegade white, about as truly represented the progressive party of Lincoln as a black vampire the ornithology of all lands. Indeed, since the war, there has never been in the South either a Republican or a Democratic party. The party line is not drawn on belief but on race and color. The white men, believing everything they please from free trade to protection, vote a ticket which they call Democratic. The negroes, and a few whites who allied themselves with them for the spoils of office, vote the other ticket. Neither of them represent anything but a race issue. To this negro party belonged Richard Travis--and the price of his infamy had been _Honorable_ before his name. But Mrs. Westmore cared nothing for this. She only knew that he was a leader of men, was handsome, well reared and educated, and that he owned The Gaffs, her old rival. And that there it stood, a fortune--a refuge--a rock--offered to her and her daughter, offered by a man who, whatever his other faults, was brave and dashing, sincere in his idolatrous love for her daughter. That he would make Alice happy she did not doubt; for Mrs. Westmore's idea of happiness was in having wealth and position and a splendid name. Having no real heart, how was it possible for her to know, as Alice could know, the happiness of love? An eyeless fish in the river of Mammoth Cave might as well try to understand what light meant. He would make Alice happy, of course he would; he would make her happy by devotion, which he was eager to give her with an unstinted hand. Alice needed it, she herself needed it. It was common sense to accept it,--business sense. It was opportunity--fate. It was the reward of a life--the triumph of it--to have her old rival--enemy--bound and presented to her. And nothing stood between her and the accomplishment of it all but the foolish romance of her daughter's youth. And so she sat building her castles and thinking: