After two weeks of careful work
he hurried to New York and reported the situation to O'Connor.
"The master mind," he began slowly, "I found at once. His name is
Holt--"
"The Judge Advocate General?"
"Yes."
"That accounts for my inability to obtain a copy of the charges against
Davis. Holt drew those charges. They are in his hands and he has
determined to press his prisoner to trial before his Board of Assassins
without allowing me to know the substance of his accusations. It's
infamous."
"There are complications which may increase our dangers or suddenly lift
them--"
"Complications--what do you mean?"
"The President, who has been intensely hostile to Davis, realizes that
his own term of office and possibly his life are now at stake. He has
broken with the Radicals who control Congress, old Thaddeus Stevens's at
their head. Stevens lives in Washington in brazen defiance of
conventionalities with a negro woman whom he separated from her husband
thirty odd years ago. Under the influence of this negress he has
introduced a bill into the House of Representatives to confiscate the
remaining property of the white people of the South and give it to the
negroes--dividing the land into plots of forty acres each. He proposes
also to disfranchise the whites of the Southern States, enfranchise the
negroes, destroy the State lines and erect on their ruins territories
ruled by negroes whom his faction can control.
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