at his left, rested with muzzle against his left side,
supporting it. A cartridge, half bitten off was in his mouth. He
leaned heavily against the small tree in front. He was quite dead, a
minie ball through his head; but thus propped he stood, the wonder of
many eyes, the last sentinel of the terrible night battle.

* * * * *

But another severed link cut deepest of all. In the realization of
her love for Thomas Travis, Alice Westmore's heart died within her.
In the years which followed, if suffering could make her a great
singer, now indeed was she great.

PART FOURTH--THE LINT

CHAPTER I

COTTONTOWN

Slavery clings to cotton.

When the directors of a cotton mill, in a Massachusetts village,
decided, in the middle '70's, to move their cotton factory from New
England to Alabama, they had two objects in view--cheaper labor and
cheaper staple.

And they did no unwise thing, as the books of the company from that
time on showed.

In the suburbs of a growing North Alabama town, lying in the
Tennessee Valley and flanked on both sides by low, regularly rolling
mountains, the factory had been built.

It was a healthful, peaceful spot, and not unpicturesque. North and
south the mountains fell away in an undulating rhythmical sameness,
with no abrupt gorges to break in and destroy the poetry of their
scroll against the sky. The valley supplemented the effect of the
mountains; for, from the peak of Sunset Rock, high up on the
mountain, it looked not unlike the chopped up waves of a great river
stiffened into land--especially in winter when the furrowed rows of
the vast cotton fields lay out brown and symmetrically turned under
the hazy sky.

The factory was a low, one-story structure of half burnt bricks.
Like a vulgar man, cheapness was written all over its face. One of
its companions was a wooden store house near by, belonging to the
company. The other companion was a squatty low-browed engine room,
decorated with a smoke-stack which did business every day in the week
except Sunday. A black, soggy exhaust-pipe stuck out of a hole in its
side, like a nicotine-soaked pipe in an Irishman's mouth, and so
natural and matter-of-fact was the entire structure that at evening,
in the uncertain light, when the smoke was puffing out of its stack,
and the dirty water running from its pipes, and the reflected fire
from the engine's furnace blazed through the sunken eyes of the
w