d the
desperation of a tigress she gave them battle, until the sheer force of
their numbers had smothered her into helplessness. Her coat was ripped
and her shirt hung in tatters from one curved shoulder before they
pinioned her and silenced her lips with a bandage.

After that they blind-folded her and carried her up and down hill,
twisting beyond all chance of guessing the course, to a place where the
air was cool with that freshness of quality that characterizes a
cavern. There they stood her upright and removed the bandage.

About her was a flare of torches and the grotesque play of shadows
between the grotto-like walls of an abandoned coal mine. About her too
ranged in the spectral formality of masked faces and black rubber
coats; of peaked hats with low turned brims, stood the circle of her
captors.

"Now, Alexander McGivins," proclaimed a deep and solemnly pitched
voice, "ye stands before ther dread an' awful conclave of ther order of
ther Ku-Klux; ther regulators of sich as defies proper an' decorous
livin'. We charges ye with unwomanly shamelessness an' with ther
practicin' of witchcraft."

CHAPTER X

For a moment as she turned observant eyes about the walls of the place
to which she had been brought, Alexander almost hoped that the
astonishing statement of the spokesman was a true one--that in store
for her, instead of robbery and possible outrage, lay only the judgment
of the punitive clan. Such punishment might be brutally severe but she
could face it in such fashion as would vindicate her claim of playing a
man's game in a man's way.

So she stood there meeting the eyes that glared at her through the slit
masks with a splendid assumption of scorn and defiance. She was keyed
to that mood which makes it possible for martyrs to acquit themselves,
even at the stake, with a victorious disdain.

Through this section of the mountains there had never been, since
reconstruction days, any survival of the Ku-Klux in a true sense, but
now and then, as in all wild and violent countries, sporadic
"regulations" occurred in which masked men took a faltering law into
their own less faltering hands. Sometimes it was a bastard Ku-Klux in
the original meaning of the term, a Vigilance Committee operating
against abuses which the law failed to check. Oftener it was a
masquerade behind which moved designs of personal hatred and vengeance.
Sometimes the wife-beater or the harlot was punished. Sometimes the