nerve food of disasters
and ascension chariots of whirlwinds."

CHAPTER XXXVI.

_Enthusiastic John Blue._

In a room of a hotel in the city in which the sanitarium having charge
of Eunice was located, Earl Bluefield sat upon a sofa, his hands, with
the fingers tightly interlaced, resting between his knees, his head and
shoulders bent forward. The intense, haggard look upon his face told
plainly of the painful meditation in which he was engaged.

Owing to Earl's peculiar status in the world, Eunice, beloved as a wife,
was far more to him than a wife. He looked upon himself as a sort of
exotic in the non-resisting Negro race and considered himself a special
object of scorn on the part of the white people of the South, who seemed
to him to resent his near approach unto them in blood, and to mistrust
_his_ kind more than all other elements in Negro life. In the absence,
therefore, of a perfect bond of racial sympathy anywhere, Eunice became
to him his world as well as his wife, and no more horrible suggestion
could be made than that he should go through life apart from her. Here
indeed had been a marriage--the welding of two into one.

Earl was not brooding as one who had hopelessly lost his all, but was
plotting as one who would save his all. The task of the knight of old
upon whom was the burden of rescuing some lovely maiden from
imprisonment in a seemingly impregnable fortress, was but child's play
compared to the task before Earl, who must scale the walls of the castle
of despair and batter down doors that laughed at the feebleness of steel
if he would claim Eunice for his own again. He was face to face with the
dreadful fact that nothing but the solution of the long standing race
problem of America could release to him the one so dear to his heart, so
essential to his existence.

As Earl sat canvassing the terrible plight in which he found himself,
his mind ran the whole gamut of panaceas that had been proposed for a
solution.

His own martial scheme of his earlier, unmarried days passed in review
before his mind, but failed to appeal to him as it did in the days of
yore. So far as he himself was concerned he would have welcomed a death
in a glorious cause as an honorable release from the ranks of the
advocates of universal justice, who, to his impatient spirit seemed to
be marking time in the face of an aggressive foe. But death for himself
would not rescue Eunice!

His mind recurred to the impressi