captioned "'The fiery cross of old Scotland's hills'", showing two robed, unmasked Klansmen, one of whom is holding a lighted cross, over a bound, blindfolded and gagged black American, while robed and hooded klansmen look on. The novel ends with a Klansman waiting for election results stating "Look at our lights on the mountains! They are ablaze - range on range our signals gleam until the Fiery Cross is lost among the stars" meaning that he had won and civilization had been saved in the South. The fiery cross is mentioned once again in the final novel of Dixon's Klan trilogy, The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire, when a Grand Dragon tosses a burning cross on a heap of discarded Klan robes and regalia in obedience to the order of the Grand Dragon to dissolve the order. This scene is accompanied by an illustration captioned "Some of the men were sobbing" by Charles David Williams featuring a gathering of Klansmen over a burning pile of robes, carrying three burning crosses. The Birth of a Nation In D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation (1915), an adaptation of Thomas Dixon's novel, The Clansman, two sequences depict cross-burnings. The first sequence depicts a Confederate colonel's little sister, who rejects a marriage proposal by a black captain (of the occupying Union force) and then he must flee after he chases her (the Piedmont, South Carolina legislature had legalized interracial marriages, and the story imagines the social chaos that whites feared would develop). She is cornered at the edge of a cliff and threatens to jump off the cliff unless he stops. He continues his pursuit, and she jumps. Her brother finds her dying at the bottom of the cliff and holds her in his arms; she identifies her attacker before she passes away. The few members of the local clan burn a small (around ) cross, drenched in the young girl's blood. A kangaroo court is convened, hears the girl's dying words when the colonel gives his testimony, finds the captain guilty of murder, and executes him. The clan members place his body on the front porch of the South Carolina governor's mansion with a square piece of white sheeting with the initials KKK. The second sequence depicts the aftermath of two home invasions. The first home invasion occurs at the governor's mansion. A black member of