Page:The leopard's spots - a romance of the white man's burden-1865-1900 (IA leopardsspotsrom00dixo).pdf/435

 his slave! What a strange circle of time, those forty years of the past!

And then the tempter whispered the right word at the right moment, and his fate was sealed.

"There's but one thing left. I will do it!" he exclaimed.

He entered the employ of a gambling joint and deliberately began a life of crime. After a month he won five hundred dollars, and went on a strange journey, visiting the scenes in Colorado, Kansas, Indiana and Ohio where negroes had recently been burned alive. He would find the ash-heap, and place on it a wreath of costly flowers. He lingered thoughtfully over the ash-piles he found in Kansas made from the flesh of living negroes. He tried to imagine the figure of John Brown marching by his side, but instead he felt the grip of Simon Legree's hand on his throat, living, militant, omnipotent. His soul had conquered the world. Yet even Legree had never dared to burn a negro to death in the old days of slavery.

He found one of these ash-heaps at the foot of the monument in Indiana to the great Western colleague of Thaddeus Stevens, and with a sigh placed his wreath on it, and passed on into Ohio.

He went to the spot where his mother had climbed up the banks of the Ohio River into the promised land of liberty, and followed the track of the old Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves a few miles. He came to a village which was once a station of this system. Here strangest of all, he found one of these ash-heaps in the public square.