by Texas
Next they threatened him. Three Klansmen, including one of enormous bulk, visited him at his home at two in the morning, warning him that he must halt all comment on the Klan 'or our next visit is gonna be more serious.'
The young editor, despite his appearance, was apparently cut from a robust Arkansas stock, because he ignored the threats, whereupon the governing committee of the Klan met to discuss what next to try. The meeting was held in the bank, after hours and without masks. Nine men, clean-shaven, well-dressed, giving even-evidence of prosperity and right living, met solemnly to discuss their options: 'We can tar-and-feather him. We can whip him publicly. Or we can shoot him. But one way or another, we are going to silence that bastard.'
There was support for each of these choices, but after additional discussion, the majority seemed to settle upon a good horsewhipping on the courthouse steps, but then Floyd Rusk, huffing and puffing, introduced a note of reason: 'Men, in this country you learn never to bust the nose of the press. If you flog that editor publicly, or even privately, the entire press of Texas and the United States is goin' to descend upon this town. And if you shoot him, the federal government will have the marshals in here.'
'What can we do?' the banker asked.
'You have the solution,' Rusk said.
'Which is what?'
'Buy the paper. Throw him out.' When this evoked discussion,
Rusk listened, judged the weight of various opinions, and said: it's quick, it's effective, and it's legal'
So without even donning their hooded costumes, the leading members of the Klan accumulated a fund and bought the paper, then, avoiding scandal, quietly drove the young editor out of town. That source of criticism was silenced, because before hiring a new editor, also a young man but this time from Dallas, the leading Klansmen satisfied themselves that he was a supporter of their movement and had been a member in the larger city.
The second problem was not so easily handled. Reverend Hislop was no irritating liberal like the editor from Arkansas, for he was against everything the Klan was against—immorality, adultery, drunkenness, shady business practice, the excesses of youth, such as blatant dancing—but he taught that these evils could best be opposed through an orderly church; he suspected that jesus would not have approved of nightriders or flaming crosses, for the latter symbol was too precious to be so abused. Hislop was not a social hero; he kept his suspicions to himself, but as in all such situations wherein a man of good intention tries to hide, the facts had a tendency to uncover him, and that is what happened.
The Klansmen, eager to adopt a procedure which had proved effective in many small towns across the state, initiated the policy of having a committee of six members dress in full regalia each Sunday morning and march as a unit to either the Baptist or Methodist church, timing their arrival to coincide with the collection. Silently, and with impressive dignity, they entered at the rear, strode up the middle aisle in formation, and placed upon the altar an envelope containing a substantial cash contribution. 'For God's work,' the leader would cry in a loud voice, whereupon the six would turn on their heels and march out.
Such pageantry impressed the citizens, gaining the Klan much popular support, especially when the amount of the contribution was magnified in the telling: They give two hunnerd big ones for the poor and needy of this community.' Many believed that God had selected them as His right arm, and the moral intention of most of their public acts supported this view. Some thoughtful men came to believe that soon the Klan would assume responsibility for all of Texas, and that when that happened, a new day of justice and honest living would result.
Reverend Hislop did not see it this way. As a devout Southerner and a strong defender of the Confederacy, he understood the emotions which had called forth the original Klan back in the dark days after 1865, and supposed that had he lived then, he would have been a Klansman, because, as he said, 'some kind of corrective
action was needed.' But he was not so sure about the motives of this revived Klan of the 1920s: 'They stand for all that's good, that I must confess. And they also support the programs of the church. They're against sin, and that puts them on my side. But decisions of punishment should be made by courts of law. In the long range of human history, there is no alternative to that. When the church dispensed justice in Spain and New England, it did a bad job. When these good men dispense their midnight justice at the country' crossroads, they do an equally imperfect job. Martha, I cannot accept their Sunday contributions any longer.'
The decision had been reached painfully, but it was set in rock. However, Hislop was not the kind of man to create a public scandal; that would have been most repugnant. So on Sunday, when the six hooded Klansmen marched into his church, their polished boots clicking, he accepted their offering, but that very afternoon he summoned Floyd Rusk and the Indiana salesman to his parsonage, where he told them: 'It is improper for you to invade the House of the Lord. It's improper for you to assume the duties of the church.'
'Why do you tell me this?' Rusk asked, and Reverend Hislop pointed a finger at the rancher's enormous belly: 'Do you think you can hide that behind a costume?'
'But why do you oppose the Klan?' Rusk asked. 'Surely it supports God's will.'
'I am sometimes confused as to what God's will really is.'
'Are you talkin' atheism?' Rusk demanded.
'I'm saying that I'm not sure what is accomplished by tarring a silly woman like Nora.'
'Surely she was an evil influence.'
'They thought that in Salem, when old women muttered. They hanged them What are you going to do to Nora now?'
'Nora has nothing to do with this. We're turning Larkin into a Christian town.'
'In some things, yes. Mr. Rusk, don't you realize that for every wayward person you correct, there are six others in our town who cheat their customers, who misappropriate funds . . . Life goes on here much as it does in Chicago or Atlanta, but you focus only on the little sinners.'
'You do talk atheism. Reverend Hislop. You better be careful.'
'I am being careful, Mr. Rusk, and I'm asking you politely, as a fellow Christian who approves of much that you do, not to enter my church any more with your offerings. The money I need, and it can be delivered in the plate like the other offerings, but the display I do not need.'
On Sunday the six Klansnnen in full regalia entered the church as usual. Led by a portly figure, they marched to the altar, where the large one said in a loud voice: 'For God s work '
Before they could click their heels and retreat, Reverend Hislop said quietly: 'Gentlemen, God thanks you for your offering His work needs all the support it can get. But you must not enter His church in disguise. You must not associate God with your endeavors, worthy though they sometimes are. Please take your offering out with you.'
No Klansman spoke. At the big man's signal they tramped down the aisle and out the door, leaving their money where they had placed it.
On previous Sundays the deacons who passed the collection plates and then marched to the altar, where the offerings were blessed, had rather grandiloquently lifted the Klan donation and placed it atop the lesser offerings, but on this day Reverend Hislop asked them not to do this. To his astonishment, one of the deacons who was a member of the Klan ostentatiously took the envelope from where Rusk had left it and placed it once more atop all the offerings, as if it took precedence because of the Klan's power in that town and in that church.
The battle lines were drawn, with a good eighty percent of the church members siding with the Klan rather than with their pastor. On the next Sunday the same three characters played the same charade. Floyd Rusk in his bedsheet made the donation, Reverend Hislop rejected it; and the deacon accepted it.
On the following Tuesday the church elders met with Reverend Hislop, a quiet-mannered man who deplored controversy, and informed him that his services were no longer required in Larkin. 'You've lost the confidence of your people,' the banker explained. 'And when that happens,
the minister has to go.'
'You're the elders,' Hislop said.
'But we want to make it easy for you,' the man from Indiana said. 'There's a Methodist church in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, lovely town among the hills. It needs a pastor, and the bishop in those parts has indicated that he would look kindly upon your removal there.'
Like the purchase of the newspaper and elimination of its editor, the Larkin Methodist Church was purified without public scandal. Reverend Hislop preached on Sunday; he rejected the Klan offering; the deacons accepted it; and on Thursday he quietly disappeared.
The Klan now ruled the little town. All blacks were gone; all Jews were gone, no Mexicans were allowed within the town limits;
and the lower class of Catholics had been eased out. It was a town of order, limited prosperity, and Christian decency. All voices of protest had been effectively silenced. Of course, as Reverend His-lop had pointed out, the same amount of acceptable crime prevailed as in any American town: some lawyers diverted public moneys into their own pockets; some doctors performed abortions; some politicians contrived election results to suit their purposes, and a good many deacons from all the churches drank moderately and played an occasional game of poker. There was a fair amount of adultery and not a little iuggling of account books, but the conspicuous social crimes which offended the middle-class morality of the district, like open cohabitation or lascivious dancing, had been brought under control.
Then, just as the Ku Kluxers were congratulating themselves, a small, dirty, sharp-eyed man named Dewey Kimbro slipped into town, bringing an irresistible alternative to the Klan, and everything blew apart.
He first appeared as a man of mystery, under thirty, with sandy red hair and a slight stoop even though he was short. He would often ride his horse far into the countryside and tell nobody anything about it. He spoke little, in fact, and when he did his words fell into two sharply defined patterns, for sometimes he sounded like a college professor, at other times like the roughest cowboy, and what his inherited vocabulary had been, no one could guess.
He attracted the attention of the Klansmen, who were not happy with strangers moving about their domain, and several extended discussions were held concerning him, with Floyd Rusk leading the attack: i don't want him prowling my ranchland.' To Rusk's surprise, the banker said: 'When he transferred his funds to us, he asked about you, Floyd.'
'He did 7 He better lay off.''
Things remained in this uncertain state, with Kimbro attracting increased attention by his excursions, now here, now there, until the day when Rusk demanded that his Klansmen take action: 'I say we run him out of town. No place here for a man like him.' But the others pointed out that he had transferred into the Larkin bank nearly a thousand dollars, and that amount of money commanded respect.
'What do we know about him?' Rusk asked with that canny rural capacity for identifying trouble.
'He boards with Nora.'
'The woman we tarred-and-feathered?'
'The same.'
'Well,' announced a third man, 'he sure as hell ain't havin' sex with someone like her.'
'But it don't look good,' Rusk said. 'We got to keep watchin'.'
Then Kimbro made his big mistake. From Jacksboro he imported on the Reo bus, which ran between the two towns, a twenty-year-old beauty named Esther, with painted cheeks and a flowery outfit she could not have paid for with her clerk's wages. Kimbro moved her right into Nora's place, and on her third night of residence the couple was visited by the hooded Klan.
'Are you two married?'
'Whose business?' Kimbro asked the question, but it could just as well have come from Esther.
'It's our business. We don't allow your kind in this town.'
'I'm here. And so is she.'
'And do you think you'll be allowed to stay here 7 '
'I sure intend to. Till I get my work done.'
'And what is your work?' a masked figure asked.
'That's my business.'
'Enough of this,' a very fat Klansman broke in. 'Kimbro, if that's your real name, you got till Thursday night to get out of town. And, miss, you by God better be goin' with him.'
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Dewey Kimbro, named after the Hero of Manila and just as taciturn, rode out of town on his speckled horse. Spies followed him for a while, but could only report that he rode awhile, stopped awhile, dismounted occasionally, then rode on. He met no one, did nothing conspicuous, and toward dusk rode back into town, where Esther and Nora had supper waiting.
The three had gone to bed—Kimbro and the girl in one room —when four hooded figures bearing whips appeared, banging on the door and calling for Kimbro to come out. Under the hoods were Lew and Les Tumlinson, twin brothers who ran the coal and lumber business, Ed Boatright, who had the Chevrolet agency where the dead Jake had worked, and Floyd Rusk, the big rancher.
When Kimbro refused to appear, the Tumlinson twins kicked in the door, stormed into Nora's small house, and rampaged through the rooms till they found Kimbro and his whore in bed. Pulling him from under the covers, they dragged his small body along the hallway and through the front door. On the lawn, in about the same position as when Jake and Nora were tarred, Rusk and Boatright had erected a cross, and were in the process of igniting it when the twins shouted: 'We got him!' When the cross lit up the sky, a horde of onlookers ran up, and there was so much
calling back and forth among the hooded figures that the crowd knew who the four avengers were: 'That's Lew Tumlinson for sure, and if he's here, so's his brother. The fat one we know, and I think the other has got to be Ed Boatright.'
Dewey Kimbro, who never missed anything, even when he was about to be thrashed, heard the names. He also heard the fat man say: 'Strip him!' and when the nightshirt was torn away and he stood naked, he heard the same man shout: 'Lay it on. Good.'
He refused to faint. He refused to cry out. In the glare of the flaming cross, he bore the first twenty-odd slashes of the three whips, but then he lost count, and finally he did faint.
At nine o'clock next morning he barged into Floyd Rusk's kitchen, and the fat man, who was an expert with revolvers from an early age, anticipated trouble and whipped out one of his big six-shooters, but before he could get it into position, he glared into the barrel of a small yet deadly German pistol pointed straight at a spot between his eyes.
For a long, tense moment the two men retained their positions, Rusk almost ready to fire his huge revolver, Kimbro prepared to fire first with his smaller gun. Finally Rusk dropped his, at which Kimbro said: 'Place it right here where I can watch it,' and Floyd did, sweating heavily.
Now let's sit down here, Mr. Rusk, and talk sense.' When the big man took his place at the kitchen table, with his gun in reach not of himself but of Kimbro, a conversation began which modified the history of Larkin County.
'Mr. Rusk, you whipped me last night—'
'Now wait!'
'You're right. You never laid a rawhide on me. But you ordered the Tumlinson twins and Ed Boatright . . .' Rusk's glistening of sweat became a small torrent. 'I ought to kill you for that, and maybe later on I will. But right now you and I need each other, and you're far more valuable to me alive than dead.'
'Why?'
i have a secret, Mr. Rusk. I've had it since I was eleven years old. Do you remember Mrs. Jackson who ran the little store?'
'Yes, I believe I do.'
'You wouldn't remember a boy from East Texas who spent one summer with her?'
'Are you that boy?'
'I am.'
'And what secret did you discover?'
'On your land . . . out by the tank . . .'
'That's not my land. My father gave it to the Yeagers.'
'I know. Your father promised it in the 1870s. You formalized it in 1909.'
'So it's not my land.'
Kimbro shifted in his chair, for the pain from his whipping was intense. He had a most important statement to make, and he wanted to be in complete control
when he made it, but just as he was prepared to disclose the purpose of his visit, Molly Rusk came into the kitchen, a big blowzy woman who, against all the rules of nature, was pregnant. She had a round, happy face made even more placid by the miracle of her condition, and with the simplicity that marked most of her actions, she took one look at Kimbro and asked: 'Aren't you the man they whipped last night 7 ' and he said: 'I am.'
She was about to ask why he was sitting in her kitchen this morning, when Rusk said respectfully: 'You better leave us alone, Molly,' and she retired with apologies, but she had barely closed the door when she returned: 'There's coffee on the stove.' Then she added: 'Floyd, don't do anything brutal with that gun.'
'True, the land is no longer yours, Mr. Rusk,' Kimbro said quietly. 'Your daddy promised it to Yeager, but when you transferred it legally, you were clever enough to retain the mineral rights.'
Rusk leaned far back in his chair. Then he placed his pudgy hands on the edge of the table, and from this position he sat staring at the little stranger. Finally, in an awed voice he asked: 'You mean . . .'
Kimbro nodded, and after readjusting his painful back, he said: 'When I stayed here that summer I did a lot of tramping about. Always have.'
'And what did you find at the tank?'
'A small rise that everyone else had overlooked. When I kicked rocks aside, I came upon . . . guess what?'
'Gold?'
'Much better. Coal.'
'Coal?'
'Yep. Sneaked some home and it burned a glowing red. Kept on burning. So I kept on exploring . . .'
'And you located a coal mine?'
'Nope. The strain was trivial, played out fast. But 1 covered the spot, piled rocks over it, and if you and I go out there this morning, we'll find a slight trace of coal hiding where it's always been.'
'And what does this mean?'