chair behind them, but he came straight on.  His cold, strong, crafty face was suddenly and fearlessly uplifted when he saw the hostile crowd, and a half-scornful smile came to his straight thin lips.  A man behind him put a detaining hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off impatiently.  Almost imperceptibly men swerved this way and that until there was an open way through them to the State-house steps, and through that human lane, nearly every man of which was at that moment longing to take his life, the autocrat strode, meeting every pair of eyes with a sneer of cold defiance.  Behind him the lane closed; the crowd gasped at the daring of the man and slowly melted away.  The mountain secretary followed him into the Senate with the resolutions he had just read, and the autocrat, still with that icy smile, received and passed them—­ into oblivion.

That night the mountain army disappeared as quickly as it had come, on a special train through that hole in the wall and with a farewell salute of gun and pistol into the drum-tight air of the little capital.  But a guard of two hundred stayed, quartered in boarding-houses and the executive buildings, and hung about the capitol with their arms handy, or loitered about the contest-board meetings where the great “steal” was feared.  So those meetings adjourned to the city hall where the room was smaller, admission more limited, and which was, as the Republicans claimed, a Democratic arsenal.  Next day the Republicans asked for three days more for testimony and were given three hours by the autocrat.  The real fight was now on, every soul knew it, and the crisis was at hand.

And next morning it came, when the same bold figure was taking the same way to the capitol.  A rifle cracked, a little puff of smoke floated from a window of a State building, and on the brick flagging the autocrat sank into a heap.

The legislature was at the moment in session.  The minority in the House was on edge for the next move.  The secretary was droning on and beating time, for the autocrat was late that morning, but he was on his way.  Cool, wary, steeled to act relentlessly at the crucial moment, his hand was within reach of the prize, and the play of that master-hand was on the eve of a master-stroke.  Two men hurried into the almost deserted square, the autocrat and his body-guard, a man known in the annals of the State for his ready use of knife or pistol.  The rifle spoke and the autocrat bent double, groaned harshly, clutched his right side, and fell to his knees.  Men picked him up, the building emptied, and all hurried after the throng gathering around the wounded man.  There was the jostling of bodies, rushing of feet, the crowding of cursing men to the common centre of excitement.  A negro pushed against a white man.  The white man pulled his pistol, shot him dead, and hardly a look was turned that way.  The doors of the old hotel closed on the wounded man, his friends went wild, and chaos followed.  It was a mountain trick,