Carteret gave his hand cordially to the gentleman thus described.

“How do you do, Captain McBane,” he said, turning to the second visitor.

The individual thus addressed was strikingly different in appearance from his companion.  His broad shoulders, burly form, square jaw, and heavy chin betokened strength, energy, and unscrupulousness.  With the exception of a small, bristling mustache, his face was clean shaven, with here and there a speck of dried blood due to a carelessly or unskillfully handled razor.  A single deep-set gray eye was shadowed by a beetling brow, over which a crop of coarse black hair, slightly streaked with gray, fell almost low enough to mingle with his black, bushy eyebrows.  His coat had not been brushed for several days, if one might judge from the accumulation of dandruff upon the collar, and his shirt-front, in the middle of which blazed a showy diamond, was plentifully stained with tobacco juice.  He wore a large slouch hat, which, upon entering the office, he removed and held in his hand.

Having greeted this person with an unconscious but quite perceptible diminution of the warmth with which he had welcomed the other, the major looked around the room for seats for his visitors, and perceiving only one chair, piled with exchanges, and a broken stool propped against the wall, pushed a button, which rang a bell in the hall, summoning the colored porter to his presence.

“Jerry,” said the editor when his servant appeared, “bring a couple of chairs for these gentlemen.”

While they stood waiting, the visitors congratulated the major on the birth of his child, which had been announced in the Morning Chronicle, and which the prominence of the family made in some degree a matter of public interest.

“And now that you have a son, major,” remarked the gentleman first described, as he lit one of the major’s cigars, “you’ll be all the more interested in doing something to make this town fit to live in, which is what we came up to talk about.  Things are in an awful condition!  A negro justice of the peace has opened an office on Market Street, and only yesterday summoned a white man to appear before him.  Negro lawyers get most of the business in the criminal court.  Last evening a group of young white ladies, going quietly along the street arm-in-arm, were forced off the sidewalk by a crowd of negro girls.  Coming down the street just now, I saw a spectacle of social equality and negro domination that made my blood boil with indignation,—­a white and a black convict, chained together, crossing the city in charge of a negro officer!  We cannot stand that sort of thing, Carteret,—­it is the last straw!  Something must be done, and that quickly!”

The major thrilled with responsive emotion.  There was something prophetic in this opportune visit.  The matter was not only in his own thoughts, but in the air; it was the spontaneous revulsion of white men against the rule of an inferior race.  These were the very men, above all others in the town, to join him in a movement to change these degrading conditions.