pledged themselves to expel him from their membership. What more do you want?"
"There's another side to it," protested the Captain. "Since the League has taken in the negroes, every Union white man has dropped it like a hot iron, except the lone scalawag or carpet-bagger who expects an office. In the church, the social circle, in business or pleasure, these men are lepers. How can a human being stand it? I've tried to grind this hellish spirit in the dirt under my heel, and unless you can do it they'll beat you in the long run! You've got to have some Southern white men or you're lost."
"I'll risk it with a hundred thousand negro majority," said Howle with a sneer. "The fun will just begin then. In the meantime, I'll have you ease up on this county's government. I've brought that man back who knocked you down. Let him alone. I've pardoned him. The less said about this affair, the better."
As the day of the election under the new regime of Reconstruction drew near, the negroes were excited by rumours of the coming great events. Every man was to receive forty acres of land for his vote, and the enthusiastic speakers and teachers had made the dream a resistless one by declaring that the Government would throw in a mule with the forty acres. Some who had hesitated about the forty acres of land, remembering that it must be worked, couldn't resist the idea of owning a mule.
The Freedman's Bureau reaped a harvest in $2 marriage fees from negroes who were urged thus to make
