ostensibly for a
chief-clerkship under Bles, and I'm pretty sure of it: it pays
twenty-five hundred. See here: if we can make Bles do some fool talking
and get it into the papers, he'll be ditched, and I'll be Register."

"Great!" shouted Teerswell.

"Wait--wait. Now, if I get the job, how would you like to be my
assistant?"

"Like it? Why, great Jehoshaphat! I'd marry Carrie--but how can I help
you?"

"This way. I want to be better known among influential Negroes. You
introduce me and let me make myself solid. Especially I must get in Miss
Wynn's set so that both of us can watch her and Alwyn, and make her
friends ours."

"I'll do it--shake!" And Stillings put his oily hand into Teerswell's
nervous grip.

"Now, here," Stillings went on, "you stow all that jealousy and heavy
tragedy. Treat Alwyn well and call on Miss Wynn as usual--see?"

"It's a hard pill--but all right."

"Leave the rest to me; I'm hand in glove with Alwyn. I'll put stuff into
him that'll make him wave the bloody shirt at the next meeting of the
Bethel Literary--see? Then I'll go to Cresswell and say, 'Dangerous
nigger--, just as I told you.' He'll begin to move things. You see?
Cresswell is in with Smith--both directors in the big Cotton
Combine--and Smith will call Alwyn down. Then we'll think further."

"Stillings, you look like a fool, but you're a genius." And Teerswell
fairly hugged him. A few more details settled, and some more whiskey
consumed, and Teerswell went home at midnight in high spirits. Stillings
looked into the glass and scowled.

"Look like a fool, do I?" he mused. "Well, I ain't!"

Congressman Cresswell was stirred to his first political activity by the
hint given him through Stillings. He not only had a strong personal
dislike for Alwyn, but he regarded the promise to him of a high office
as a menace to the South.

The second speech which Alwyn made at the Bethel Literary was, as
Stillings foresaw, a reply to the stinging criticisms of certain colored
papers engineered by Teerswell, who said that Alwyn had been bribed to
remain loyal to the Republicans by a six thousand dollar office. Alwyn
had been cut to the quick, and his reply was a straight out defence of
Negro rights and a call to the Republican Party to redeem its pledges.

Caroline Wynn, seeing the rocks for which her political craft was
headed, adroitly steered several newspaper reports into the waste
basket, but Stillings saw to it that a circumstantia