His assets, like those of the Manlys and others, would enrich some of the leading white families in town. All the papers would be legal, notarized by the Democratic register of deeds.

They caught Chief Deputy George Z. French sneaking out the back door of the Orton Hotel and hauled him in a wagon to the Atlantic Coastline depot on Red Cross Street, escorted by a forest of Wilmington Light Infantry bayonets. Outside the depot, Red Shirts swarmed aboard the wagon and seized the reins. They stopped it under the twisted limbs of a grandfather live oak and tossed a rope over the stoutest one, then looped a noose around his neck. Before they could drive the wagon out from under him, he cried out in gibberish. His high voice carried the weird ring of incantation.

Harry Calabash was watching. “I’ll be damned,” he said out loud to the woman reporter in the crimson jacket.

“What? Has he lost his mind?”

Calabash laughed sweetly. “It’s code—the secret Masonic cry for help. His brother Freemasons can’t refuse.”

And even as he spoke, men in suits came streaming out of the crowd. Two of them held the horses while Heiskel Gouvenier and others climbed aboard and took the noose off French’s neck.

“What’s so funny about that?”

Calabash laughed again. Sam ought to be here to see this, he thought. “Fellow’s got the hangman’s noose around his neck, and he still believes his club won’t let him down.”

Armond Scott, the young Negro lawyer who had failed to deliver the answer to Waddell’s ultimatum, was put on the seven o’clock northbound train that evening—the same train that carried Deputy French. But Scott was escorted to the Negro car.

And so it went. The city was being systematically emptied of the opposition party—the party of carpetbaggers, Negroes, Populists, and Republicans. Order was being restored. The black middle class disappeared.

No Negroes were allowed to come into the city limits without first being searched. Men and women alike were frisked, and some suspicious characters were required to strip. Parcels and bags were ransacked for weapons. Wagons were unloaded onto the street. The posses confiscated several billy clubs, a razor, a broken pistol, and three old case knives.

But blacks were allowed to leave the city unmolested, and they fled in droves. The road over Smith’s Creek Bridge was clogged with pedestrians. The mill workers and domestic servants who chose to remain were escorted to their jobs by squads of mounted vigilantes. White boys were pressed into escort duty. Safe conduct passes were issued. White men were quickly hired to fill the places of black men dismissed from the police and fire departments. The bureaucracy of order was taking hold.