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river—but many of the finest white gentlemen who live in the city come to be trimmed here as well. The Judge is a daily customer, as is Mr. Turpin. Colonel Waddell wears a full gray mane of hair and beard, like he did before the Emancipation, when he was known as a real fire-breather. Looks just like the Jeff Davis statue they put up in Raleigh, and only wants a bit of neatening up once a week. He waxes the tips of his moustache at home.
    “They’ve got the governor and they’ve got the numbers,” says Mr. Turpin. “The way they’ve got it fixed, it’ll take a revolution to push them out.” Mr. Turpin is thin on top, and Hoke is carefully spreading what’s left with his comb to cover the scalp.
    “We must not bow to the tyranny of numbers,” says the Judge. “What if tomorrow the Sprunts decide to bring in five thousand Chinamen to bale their cotton? Should we be ruled then by Chinamen? I think not.”
    Dorsey waits, razor in hand, for the Judge to stop moving his jaw.
    “Humiliation, I tell you,” the Judge goes on. “Russell and his gang sold the farmers and the illiterate mountainfolk a bill of goods, they bought the colored vote with bribes and favors and white men’s positions, and now he means to rub our noses in his success. He means to ruin this city.”
    Dorsey crosses to put a couple towels into the steamer. When the Judge gets going like this it’s best to wait him out. He’s been known to jump to his feet and pace, so you have to be careful with the cutting edges.
    “The Redeemers have worked wonders in other states,” says Turpin, soothingly. “South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana—”
    “Where they’ve looked the thing in the eye and dealt with it.”
    “It could happen here, Judge. And very soon.” Hoke is whisking the back of the pharmacist’s neck. “Somebody’s just got to put the thing in motion.”
    “We’ve got them on the police force now.” The Judge shakes his head violently, ignoring the lather on his face. Dorsey taps a couple drops of witch hazel into his palm, holds it under his nose. Mrs. Scott brews up a batch of it for him and he has Hoke pour it into the store-bought bottles when they get low. The Judge swivels his chair around to face Mr. Turpin, getting himself indignant. “Do you think they’ll arrest their own? Not on your life . And if they do, they’ve got the juries packed and the darky walks out free as daylight and twice as bold as he was before.”
    It is the gentlemen’s right to choose their topic, of course, but Dorsey always prefers sport to politics. He’s one of the sponsors of the Mutuals, and can hold the floor on the relative merits of every ballplayer in New Hanover County, black and white. He can talk horses, he can talk Bible if there’s a man of God in the chair, he can even recite The Arrow and the Song if pressed into service. Politics, though, especially the Wilmington variety, make him sweat.
    “Plato believed that men should be governed by philosopher kings,” Colonel Waddell observes. “I fear we have drifted away from that ideal.”
    “It wouldn’t surprise me,” says the Judge, “that if it serves the interests of these Fusioneers or Repopulists or whatever they’re labeling themselves now, we’ll have women’s suffrage thrown into the mix.”
    “Women, white women, have the sense to listen to their husbands’ counsel,” says Turpin. “Giving them the vote would be redundant.” There is still a separate entrance for ladies at the Orton. Dorsey cannot imagine them in politics—the harangues and heated confrontations, the spitting and swearing. Women are above all that, made to bind up what the men have broken.
    The Judge snorts and lather flies. “Well I daresay they wouldn’t have given the city over to carpetbaggers and Hottentots.”
    Mr. Turpin laughs. “That’s what the illustrious Mrs. Felton would have us believe.”
    “A woman who writes,” Colonel Waddell muses behind his paper, “is like a