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“Gawd!” said an old darky. “Ku-klux done come again.” And, indeed, it looked like a Ku-klux mask, white, dropping below the chin, and with eye-holes through which gleamed two bright fires.

The eyes of Buck and Mollie were turned from Marston at last, and open-mouthed they stared.

“Hit’s the same hoss–hit’s Dave!” said Buck aloud.

“Well, my Lord!” said Mollie simply.

The Hon. Sam rose again.

“And who is Sir Tardy Knight that hither comes with masked face?” he asked courteously. He got no answer.

“What’s your name, son?”

The white mask puffed at the wearer’s lips.

“The Knight of the Cumberland,” was the low, muffled reply.

“Make him take that thing off!” shouted some one.

“What’s he got it on fer?” shouted another.

“I don’t know, friend,” said the Hon. Sam; “but it is not my business nor prithee thine; since by the laws of the tournament a knight may ride masked for a specified time or until a particular purpose is achieved, that purpose being, I wot, victory for himself and for me a handful of byzants from thee.”

“Now, go ahead, Budd,” called the Mayor again. “Are you going crazy?”

The Hon. Sam stretched out his arms once to loosen them for gesture, thrust his chest out, and uplifted his chin: “Fair ladies, nobles of the realm, and good knights,” he said sonorously, and he raised one hand to his mouth and behind it spoke aside to me:

“How’s my voice–how’s my voice?”

“Great!” His question was genuine, for the mask of humor had dropped and the man was transformed. I knew his inner seriousness, his oratorical command of good English, and I knew the habit, not uncommon among stump-speakers in the South, of falling, through humor, carelessness, or for the effect of flattering comradeship, into all the lingual sins of rural speech; but I was hardly prepared for the soaring flight the Hon. Sam took now. He started with one finger pointed heavenward:

“The knights are dust
And their good swords are rast;
Their souls are with the saints, we trust.”

“Scepticism is but a harmless phantom in these mighty hills. We BELIEVE that with the saints is the GOOD knight’s soul, and if, in the radiant unknown, the eyes of those who have gone before can pierce the little shadow that lies between, we know that the good knights of old look gladly down on these good knights of to-day. For it is good to be remembered. The tireless struggle for name and fame since the sunrise of history attests it; and the ancestry worship in the East and the world-wide hope of immortality show the fierce hunger in the human soul that the memory of it not only shall not perish from this earth, but that, across the Great Divide, it shall live on–neither forgetting nor forgotten. You are here in memory of those good knights to prove that the age of chivalry is not gone; that though their good swords are rust, the stainless soul of them still illumines every harmless spear point before me and makes it a torch that shall reveal, in your own hearts still aflame, their courage, their chivalry, their sense of protection for the weak, and the honor in which they held pure women, brave men, and almighty God.

“The tournament, some say, goes back to the walls of Troy. The form of it passed with the windmills that Don Quixote charged. It is with you to keep the high spirit of it an ever-burning vestal fire. It was a deadly play of old–it is a harmless play to you this day. But the prowess of the game is unchanged; for the skill to strike those pendent rings is no less than was the skill to strike armor-joint, visor, or plumed crest. It was of old an exercise for deadly combat on the field of battle; it is no less an exercise now to you for the field of life–for the quick eye, the steady nerve, and the deft hand which shall help you strike the mark at which, outside these lists, you aim. And the crowning triumph is still just what it was of old–that to the victor the Rose of his world–made by him the Queen of Love and Beauty for us all–shall give her smile and with her own hands place on his brow a thornless crown.”