OVER at the executive mansion, Governor Chatham and his private secretary were at dinner when the telegram came. The governor took the yellow envelope from the butler’s tray and tore it open. When he had read the message he passed it over without a word to Gilman. The private secretary’s eyes widened as he read it, and he exclaimed:
“Jim Lockhart dead!”
William, the black butler, stirred uneasily. The governor bent forward, and lifted his coffee to his lips. Gilman laid the despatch beside his plate, and, still looking at it, began to pinch the golden tip of a cigarette. William slid noiselessly to his side with a match. When Gilman had lighted his cigarette he said:
“Poor Jim!”
“Yes, poor Jim.”
A strange quality in the governor’s tone gave expression to something more than sadness. His face was somber, immobile, inscrutable. He dropped his napkin, and, without lighting his cigar, though William stood by, shading the little flame of the ready match with his pale palm, he rose and went slowly into the library. About the walls were his beloved books. On the broad, heavy table of Flemish oak a shaded lamp rose over the magazines, the pamphlets, the scattered books and the Chicago newspapers, which reach Springfield at noon. In the wide chimney—over which is carved those words from the Benedicte, “Oh, ye Fire and Heat, Bless ye the Lord”—a brazier of Sangamon County coal was blazing. Outside a cold November rain was driving against the tall windows of the mansion. The governor sank into a deep leather chair. He supported his head in his hand and gazed into the fire.
Gilman followed, and seating himself, likewise fell into a melancholy reverie. The silence within, and the wind sweeping the rain back and forth like a broom without, oppressed him. He was a young man. Once or twice he looked at the governor, and then the silence, the wind and the rain forced him to speak.
“He seemed to be in perfect health when he went away Wednesday,” he said.
The silence deepened. The wind threshed the trees and the rain drenched the windows anew. Gilman spoke again. He said:
“The party’s lost a good man.”
“And I have lost another friend,” said the governor. He was growing old.
Without moving, still gazing deeply into the coals, after a little minute, he added:
“He was the most generous man I ever knew.”
“Yes; and I believe, after all, when the time came, he would have been with you for the renomination.” The governor stretched out his hand to stay Gilman’s speech.
“I was not thinking of that, Leonard.”
The governor did this gently, as he did all things. Gilman’s face reddened—for the fire was growing hot—and silence fell again between them. Gilman felt the silence. He flung his cigarette into the fire. Then he rose.
“Guess I’ll go over to the Leland,” he said. “Some of the boys may have particulars.”
The governor nodded acquiescence, but as Gilman reached the door that leads into the northwest drawing-room, he spoke:
“Before you go hand me the statutes, if you please. I suppose I have some duty to perform in an event like this.”
Gilman who longed only for action, bore with alacrity the three big calf-skin volumes to the library table, and turned to the index.
“I’ll find the section for you.” Gilman examined the second volume for an instant, and then said: “Here it is.”
“Read it, please,” said the governor.
And Gilman read: “‘Section sixteen. In case of the death of the treasurer, it shall be the duty of the governor to take possession of the office of such treasurer, and cause the vaults thereof to be closed and securely locked, and so remain until a successor is appointed and qualified; and at the time such successor takes possession of the office, he, together with the auditor of public accounts and any of the bondmen of the deceased treasurer who shall be present, shall proceed to take an account of all moneys, papers, books, records and other property coming into his possession; and the auditor shall take of such succeeding treasurer his receipt therefor and keep the same on file in his office.’ There,” concluded Gilman, closing the book, and then immediately reopening it, “that’s it—it’s chapter one hundred and thirty, section sixteen of the act of eighteen seventy-three, page twenty-three twenty-seven.”
“Now turn,” said the governor, “to the chapter on elections, chapter forty-six, I think it is, and see what it says about the appointment of a successor.”
Gilman tilted up the first volume, and inspected the red and black labels on its back; then he turned to chapter forty-six, and, running his finger down the pages until he found the section, read hurriedly, mumbling his words until he came to the vital sentence:
“‘When a vacancy shall occur in the office of secretary of state, auditor of public accounts,’ yes, here it is” (he accentuated the word) “‘treasurer, attorney-general, superintendent of public instruction’” (he was reading rapidly now and running words together) “‘or member of the state board of equalization, the governor’” (and now he raised his voice and read more slowly and distinctly) “‘the governor shall fill the same by appointment, and the appointee shall hold his office during the remainder of the term, and until his successor is elected and qualified.’ That’s section hundred and twenty-eight.”
“Well,” said the governor, “I’ll name Hillman to fill the vacancy.” Hillman was the treasurer-elect, chosen by the people in November to succeed Lockhart. He was not of the party, however, to which the governor belonged. In Illinois, it will be remembered, treasurers are elected not quadrennially, as are the other state officials, but biennially, and a treasurer can not succeed himself. So that in the middle of an administration there is always an off year, and a reaction, and as the papers say, a stinging rebuke at the polls.
“M-m-yes,” said Gilman, “the boys won’t like it—but it’s only for a couple of months.”
“And as to sealing the treasury,” continued the governor, “I presume that the morning will be time enough for that.”
“Yes, it’s a bad night outside, anyway,” responded Gilman. The governor was lost again in thought. Gilman went on and out.
The governor, alone in the library, continued to gaze into the fire. Once he took from the table at his elbow a worn book, which he handled tenderly. He read in it for a while. It was The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius. But he did not read long. Presently he was sitting with the forefinger of one hand between the leaves of the book, which lay in his lap, musing on the fire again. Outside the rain drenched the tall windows of the mansion.
The clock in the hall tolled eleven. The governor rose, and went slowly up the staircase that winds gracefully from the great hall to the floor above, and thence to his chamber and his bed.
In a room on the parlor floor of the Leland, the windows of which looked down on Sixth street, a short, fat man was pacing the floor. His unbuttoned waistcoat showed a white shirt stretched over a large paunch. His hair was greased with perspiration, big drops of which stood out on his forehead, and slid down his pendulous, dewlapt cheeks. He had a bristling mustache, at which he gnawed when he removed his cigar from his lips, and a short goatee at which he plucked incessantly with his fingers. When his cigar was in his mouth, he rolled it about and ground it between his teeth. At times he spat pieces of the tobacco leaves fiercely into the grate. The cigar was burning unevenly, and fuming so that the little man winked his little eyes. On a table in the room, littered with the inevitable Chicago papers, and strewn with poker chips, stood an empty whisky glass. The rumpled counterpane of the bed showed that the little man had been tossing upon it. As he paced up and down he talked to himself, and at times swore.
“Hell,” he would say, “why the devil doesn’t he come!”
Occasionally he would draw out his watch, and scowl at its face. Then he would look at the old-fashioned brass crank on the wall, beside the door, which sometimes pulled a call-bell in the office below, and sometimes did not, but he did not ring it. He ran his fingers through his tumbled hair, and paced up and down.
The little man was William Grigsby, and he was the attorney-general of the state of Illinois. He had come down from the Jo Daviess hills, to serve a term in the house, and been nominated for the office he now held by the governor, John Chatham. John Chatham was his political creator, and the two men had once been friends. The administration had begun harmoniously enough, but before two of the four years of its political life had expired there was a split, and factions had formed. There had been a fierce fight for the control of the state central committee that year, and the struggle had been carried into the state convention, which nominated a state treasurer, a superintendent of public instruction, and trustees of the university of Illinois. In one faction were the governor, the auditor of public accounts, and, of course, his appointees, the adjutant-general, the railroad and warehouse commissioners and the trustees of the state institutions. In the other were the attorney-general and the secretary of state, Jennings. Lockhart, the state treasurer, had been neutral. He was everybody’s friend. The lieutenant-governor did not count. The superintendent of public instruction was not a politician, save in teachers’ institutes, where he was cheered and indorsed in classic resolutions.
And now Grigsby was an avowed candidate for governor, in opposition to his old friend, John Chatham, the man who had made him. Two years bring about great changes in politics. Grigsby, in that time, had grown corpulent, had hardened his liver and his heart, and was threatened with Bright’s disease.
The attorney-general continued to smoke and pace the floor, and swear. After a while he consulted his watch again, and then gave the old-fashioned brass bell-pull a vigorous jerk. Presently a negro boy came bearing a presumptive pitcher of water, the tinkling of the ice heralding his approach. The attorney-general would have welcomed iced water in the morning, but now he seized it from the black boy’s hand, set it down with a splash on his wash-stand, and shouted:
“Go and tell Jim to mix me a commodore.”
Just as the boy reached the door, it opened, and a tall man entered. The tall man seeing the boy, looked at Grigsby.
“What’ll you have, Hank?” said the attorney-general.
“A little whisky.”
“Bring Mr. Jennings some whisky,” ordered the attorney-general.
“Bourbon, boy,” added Mr. Jennings.
The boy withdrew.
The attorney-general paused before the fire, and looked up into the face of the secretary of state.
“Well, Hank,” he said, “I began to fear you hadn’t got my message. Heard the news?”
The secretary of state lazily pulled off his wet overcoat and flung it across the bed, and then, shaking the water from his broad-brimmed black slouch hat in the careless way they have down in southern Illinois, he tossed it after the coat, on which it fell with a damp slap. He stood six feet in height, and would have been taller had he not stooped. His face was long, his skin dingy and sallow, and his thin nose, beginning between deep-set eyes of steely blue, stretched down the middle of his visage, and precipitated itself over the black mustache that drooped thin and moist about his mouth. His hair, glossy black, though he was fifty, was flung straight across his brow and over his left ear, giving the effect of a mane. Behind, it greased the collar of a long black frock coat that wrapped him lankly. A narrow black tie hung unknotted at his throat. When he moved it was in that loose and lazy way that told, as his hat and his habit did, that he came from the country south of the old O. and M., which divides Egypt from the corn lands of central Illinois. He drew a rocking-chair to the grate, and stretching himself comfortably in it, with his feet upon the ash-strewn fender, drew from his hip pocket a plug of tobacco and gnawed on it. Then he drawled, in a voice haunted by musical echoes of southern ancestry:
“What news?”
“Why,” replied the attorney-general, “haven’t you heard? Jim Lockhart’s dead.”
“The hell he is!” responded Jennings. “I hadn’t heerd ary word. When’d he die?”
“This afternoon.”
“Sudden?”
“Rather.”
“What was ailin’ of him?”
The attorney-general smiled, a peculiar, mirthless smile.
The secretary of state ceased to rock.
“You don’t reckon now—”
“That’s it exactly.”
“I didn’t know it’d got that bad. What’d they give out fer the cause?”
“Oh, heart failure, I suppose.”
“Beats hell, don’t it?”
The secretary of state was silent. Presently he spoke again in an abstracted way:
“Well, Jim ’as a devil of a good feller, as good as you’d meet up ’ith in a coon’s age. An’ I reckon when it come to a show-down, he ’as our friend. If the boys ’p’ints an investigatin’ committee—Jim ’as al’ays a leetle too free ’ith the stuff.”
Grigsby said “Yes,” in a detached tone. Then there was silence for a space. The bell-boy knocked, bore in his tray and departed. The men nodded over the edges of their little glasses each to the other, and drank. Then Grigsby, wiping his lips, said:
“Hank, I didn’t send for you to-night to hold memorial services over Jim Lockhart. There’s something more important than that—there’s something damned important, and it concerns me.”
“You?”
“Yes, me. I’m in this thing just twenty thousand dollars.”
“The hell you are!”
“Just—twenty—thousand—dollars.”
Grigsby sank into a chair.
“Borrowed?” asked Jennings.
“Yes.”
“Public funds?”
“Well—I don’t know. Course—”
“Jim Lockhart didn’t have no private fortune—’ithout it ’as the int’rust.”
“Well, suppose it was.”
“An’thin’ to show fer it?”
“I gave him three notes—one for ten, two for five thousand each.”
“Well, you’re a bigger damn fool than I gave you credit fer bein’.”
The attorney-general, clutching his fingers into his hair, rested his elbows on his short knees, and bowed his head. “And with the governorship just in plain sight, too,” he groaned.
“Well, it wasn’t so damn plain,” said Jennings.
Then as his eye rested on the man bowed beside him, the sweat trickling down his tallow face, something in the droop of the figure touched a chord of pity in his heart, and the tall Egyptian laid a hand on Grigsby’s shoulder, saying in another tone:
“Don’t take on that way. Let’s see what can be done.”
“Yes, let’s,” assented Grigsby.
The Egyptian knitted the brows over his long, narrow nose.
“Hev you got any money?” he asked.
“I!” exclaimed Grigsby, with a sardonic grunt.
“Any property?”
“Only my house up home.”
“Hain’t you any friends up there, any bankers that’ll take care o’ this thing fer you?”
Grigsby laughed ironically.
“Cain’t you lay down on somebody fer it?”
Grigsby shook his head.
“How’s your quo ’arranto proceedin’s ’gainst the Chicago Consolidated?”
“It isn’t ripe yet,” said Grigsby, “and, anyhow, there isn’t time. Damn it, man,” he said, raising his voice, and striking his knee with his fist, “it’s got to be done now, to-night, or I’m lost. The governor, under the law, must seal the treasury at once, and you know just how long John Chatham’ll wait. We’ve got to take care of this thing to-night, to-night, I tell you. That’s why I sent for you.” The attorney-general spoke angrily, and with a puffed face that flushed an unhealthy red, and then added, stretching forth his hand and laying it on Jennings’ knee, “You’re my friend, ain’t you?”
“Sure,” said the secretary of state carelessly, and then knitted his brows again. After a few minutes he said:
“Say, Bill, you and the governor used to be friends, and he hain’t a bad feller, no-way. He got you your nomination, you know—why don’t you go to him—”
“Go to the governor?” cried Grigsby; “and tell him—tell him!”
“Bill,” said the secretary of state, “you don’t know the governor. He hain’t my kind, ner I his’n, but I’ll tell you one thing—he hain’t the man to take advantage of a feller. You’d be as safe in his hands as you would in mine—safer, maybe,” Jennings concluded, with a good-humored chuckle.
Grigsby emphatically, doggedly, shook his head.
“It never would do in this world,” he said, “never.”
“Why, you could get him to hold off till you could take care of it. You and him used to be such friends—tell him you’ll lay down fer the sake of old times—that’s the thing—tell him an’thin’ to get him to hold off fer a few days. Then you’ll have time to turn ’round.”
“Look here, Jennings,” said Grigsby, straightening up and glaring at the secretary of state, “Chatham’s got all you fellows hypnotized. You think he’s a little tin god, that he’s incapable of doing a mean act, of throwing a friend down, or anything of that sort. I tell you I know him better than all of you do. He and I used to be close, thicker’n—”
“You wasn’t borrowin’ money out o’ the state treasury them days, though, was you, Bill?” interrupted Jennings.
Grigsby colored.
“No, you was somethin’ of a reformer yourself.”
Grigsby colored more deeply.
“An’ as fer the throwin’ down—we know who done the heft o’ that. Course I don’t care—it suits me—but give a houn’ his dues.”
Grigsby’s color had changed by swift gradations of tone to splenetic blackness. He broke in upon Jennings’ indictment of him, and his defense of the governor:
“Oh, drop that—let’s talk business. I tell you I know Chatham, and I ain’t goin’ to put myself in his hands.”
He drew out his watch and opened it.
“It’s half-past eight now, and he doubtless knows Lockhart’s dead—probably he’s got the treasury sealed.”
Jennings’ brow was gathered once more in wrinkles that indicated thought. His face rapidly assumed an expression of determination. Presently he rose.
“Bill,” he said, “I’m goin’ to do somethin’ fer you I wouldn’t do fer any other livin’ man.”
Grigsby raised an appealing, yearning face.
“Yest’day I deposited in Gregory’s bank over at Decatur twenty-four thousand dollars. It’s the fees received in my office durin’ the last quarter. It’s lucky fer you they was unusually large—”
“Yes,” said Grigsby, and his expression, expectant and hopeful a moment before, clouded, “but it’s in Decatur, and we’re in Springfield and we’ve got to have it now, to-night, if it’s goin’ to do us any good. What the devil did you want to deposit it in Gregory’s bank for?”
“Because,” replied Jennings, “Gregory’s rich, and a contributor, an’ he can deliver Macon County, and we’ll want Macon County’s ten votes, if I hain’t mistaken, one of these days. But never mind that now—it’s the on’y thing we can do.”
Jennings looked at his watch. “It’s now twenty-five till nine. A train goes out on the Wabash at nine-five. I’ll send Hennessey over on that train with a note to Gregory, an’ a check. He can get twenty thousand, an’ ketch a train back ’bout eleven-twenty, I think, anyway—that train that gets here at twelve-forty. You can take the money, put it back in the treasury, ’fore the governor seals ’er up, an’—”
Grigsby sprang toward Jennings and seized his hand.
“Hank, you’re the best friend I ever had,” he cried, and his eyes glistened.
“Aw, don’t talk like that,” said Jennings awkwardly.
“But can we trust Hennessey?” said Grigsby, the next instant, his eyes dilating, his hand suddenly dropping by his side.
“Hell, we’ve got to,” said Jennings. Then he strode across the room and turned the old-fashioned brass bell-pull.
When a black boy grinned in the doorway, Jennings sent for Hennessey, and soon, the old elevator having clambered to the parlor floor, there was a knock. Jennings yelled “Come!” and in the doorway stood a young Irishman, red-cheeked and with closely-cropped, silver-sprinkled black hair. In the cities, the hair of the Irish-American—especially in politics, and they are all in—turns gray early. Hennessey was strong in the Thirteenth Ward of Chicago, hence his job in the office of the secretary of state. Jennings had been writing while awaiting the Irishman’s coming. Turning to him the secretary of state gave his instructions, and he departed. As he closed the door Grigsby called:
“I’ll make it all right with you, Mike.”
Grigsby went to the window and pressed his face to one of the small panes, placing his hands as blinds beside his eyes as a little child does. The cold glass soothed his forehead deliciously. He saw Shorty, who has driven “statesmen” on their mysterious nightly rounds for generations, mount the box of his old hack and pull his reluctant horses into the street. Then he turned to confront the three hours’ wait. He poked the smouldering fire of soft prairie coal, gave Jennings a cigar, and was about to pull the old-fashioned brass bell crank that more cheer might be added to the factitious comfort he sought to create in the room, when Jennings, meditatively scratching his head, said:
“Bill, where’s them notes o’ yourn?”
“Why, in the treasury, I suppose.”
“Well, you’ll have to get some one who can open the vaults fer you to-night.”
Grigsby’s brow darkened, and the small cheerfulness that had begun to adumbrate itself in his face faded quite away.
“That’s so—I hadn’t thought of that.”
He pondered heavily and then said, the old note of fear in his tone:
“Has that vault a time lock?”
“I reckon.”
They were silent.
“Well,” said Grigsby presently, breaking the silence, “I’ll have to get Mendenhall.” Mendenhall was the assistant state treasurer, and was counted among the adherents of Grigsby.
“Better let me go,” said Jennings, taking up his coat and hat.
When he had gone Grigsby again paced the floor. Now he would pause at the window and look down into Sixth Street, where the rain, falling hopelessly and helplessly, was making pools in the depressions of the cedar block pavement that glinted in the white glare of the arc light spluttering before the hotel. Whenever the hoarse sounds of distant locomotive whistles came to him out of the wet night, he jerked forth his watch and sighed as he replaced it. Then he began to worry because Jennings did not reappear. He wondered if Governor Chatham would venture out in such a night to seal the treasury. He cursed Chatham, who had made him, and finally Jennings, who had saved him. Altogether, he passed a very bad two hours. And then Jennings returned. As the tall Egyptian entered the room, Grigsby demanded:
“Where you been?”
“Over to the St. Nick—met up ’ith some o’ the boys, an’ set into a little game fer a while.”
“See Mendenhall?”
“Yep—he’ll be ’long. Gosh! it’s a regular Shawneetown flood outside!” And the man waved his big hat in a wide arc, the spray from it spitting angrily as it sprinkled the fire in the grate.
“So it’s all right, is it?”
“Ump huh.”
“How about the time lock?”
“Oh, George says they don’t never use that—haven’t sence the day the senate ’p’inted that committee to count the money in the treasury. ’Member? By gosh, didn’t pore ol’ Jim hustle to get a special train an’ haul that money down from Chicago, though?”
The secretary of state wagged his long head and chuckled.
“That thing lost him e’enamost fifty thousan’ in int’rust, he tol’ me onct,” the secretary of state went on, “an’ he hain’t never been able sinct to make ary long loan.”
Again he laughed, and, the spirit of reminiscence being upon him, he went on: “One time ’fore the war, the legislature ’p’inted a countin’ committee, an’ ol’—oh, what’s ’is name?—you know—from Gallatin County—he ’as treasur’ then, an’ the’ wasn’ more’n about fifty thousan’ in the safe, but he ’as game, an’ when the committee ’peared next mornin’, he says, ‘Cert’n’y, gentlemen,’ an’ handed ’em out about ten thousan’ in them old green dollar bills, an’ says: ‘When yo’re done countin’ o’ them ’ere, I’ll give you all some more.’ An’ in ’bout an hour they reckoned they’d take his figur’s—they’d have to do.”
Grigsby’s heart lightened, and he became almost gay, ordering much drink. And for an hour the two men sat there, waiting and smoking, and drinking whisky—Jennings bourbon and Grigsby rye—and were content. Though every time the yowl of a locomotive was borne to him on the cold, wet night, Grigsby jerked out his watch. And once he started at a short knock on the door, but it was only Mendenhall.
After midnight Grigsby’s anxiety deepened, and he ceased to pay attention to Jennings’ stories of politics down in “southern Eellinoy,” stories about Don Morrison and John A. Logan. At twelve-forty he rose and trod the floor, but Jennings’ long form was stretched out before the fire, his whisky glass was at his elbow, and he said from time to time:
“Oh, fer God’s sake, Bill, set down—they’ll be ’long all right.”
“Isn’t that the Wabash?” said Grigsby, cocking his head at the night cry of a locomotive.
“I don’ know,” said Jennings, who was growing mellow, “on’y whistles I could ever tell was them on the ol’ O. and M., ’ceptin’ o’ course, the toot of the Three States, which is now at Cairo, ef she hain’t stuck on a mud bank over on the Mizzouri shore some’er’s ’round Bird’s Landin’.”
Grigsby looked at his watch. It was ten minutes of one, and just as he dolefully announced the hour the door opened, and Hennessey entered, carrying a leather traveling-bag. Grigsby leaped toward him, his itching fingers outstretched to seize the valise.
“Is it all there?” he exclaimed.
“Take me for a thief?” replied Hennessey, swinging the bag behind him.
Hennessey proffered the bag to his master, but Jennings said:
“Wait a minute.” Then he ran his hand wrist-deep into his pocket and drew out a paper, which he examined critically, squinting his eyes, partly to protect them from the smoke that curled up from a big domestic cigar, partly—as it seemed, to assist in the concentration of his thoughts.
“Gineral,” he said—by some strange confusion of ideas, down in Springfield they give the attorney-general a military title, which custom that functionary fosters—“Gineral, will you give me your signature to that, ’fore you start?”
Grigsby glowered at Jennings, read the paper, said somewhat petulantly, “Oh, of course,” and hesitatingly signed it.
“Now, Hennessey,” said Jennings, carefully placing the paper in a long pocket-book he drew from the region of his left hip.
Hennessey held the bag out toward the secretary of state.
“No,” said Jennings, who was pouring himself a drink, “give it to the gineral.”
The attorney-general took the bag and opened it. Inside were four big bundles of bank bills. He lifted them out. Each bundle was composed of ten smaller packages, held by rubber bands, and each package was bound with a pink paper strap neatly pinned and marked “five hundred.” He counted and replaced the packages in the bag. Then taking his coat and hat, he turned to Jennings and said:
“Well, let’s be gone.”
The secretary of state rolled his head toward the attorney-general, waved his long arm and flapped his hand fin-like at him, and said:
“We’ll wait here, Mike and me. You won’t need us.”
The attorney-general scowled, and then went out, accompanied only by the assistant state treasurer. Hurrying down Capitol Avenue, Grigsby shivered, glancing up dark alleys.
The clock in the hall of the executive mansion had struck the half-hour after midnight, and the governor was descending the stairs in a gray bath-robe and slippers. The old house was dark and still. Even the room occupied by Gilman, who should, at that hour, have been reading the magazines in bed, showed no light. The governor, softly treading, entered the library. The last embers of the fire were smouldering. The governor lighted the lamp, and in the circle of soft light it spread on the library table, he bent over a book, his glasses on his nose, their cord hanging down into his lap. He turned the leaves of the book. It was not The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius. It was the second volume of The Revised Statutes of Illinois, a stupid work which many men consult, laboriously, far into the night. He softly rustled over the leaves until he found chapter one hundred and thirty. He ran his finger down the pages till it stopped at section sixteen. And then he read very slowly: “In case of the death of the treasurer, it shall be the duty of the governor to take possession of the office of such treasurer and cause the vaults thereof to be closed and securely locked, and so remain until—” He read the words again, and again a third time, and yet again.
He closed the book, put out the lamp and slowly felt his way back up the stairs.
Ten minutes later he descended again, and groping in the hall, drew a greatcoat over his broad shoulders, covered his head with the slouch hat he wore when he went down into southern Illinois, and let himself out of the wide front door. The asphalt driveway that flings its long curve through the grounds of the gubernatorial residence from Fifth Street to Fourth, gleamed like the surface of a river at night. The rain no longer fell, but the trees dripped dismally. Across the low night sky black clouds were flying. The governor walked down the driveway to the big iron gates at Fourth Street, whose watered surface as far as he could see, wavered under the electric lights at the crossings. The governor turned at Jackson Street and walked down the sleeping little avenue toward Second Street. Before a low brown house trickling its eaves behind two sentinel cedars, he halted. He went up the moist brick walk, and pulled the white bell-knob. The bell jangled harshly upon the sleeping stillness. The jangling trembled away. He rang again. There was a reluctant stir within and a voice, a scared woman’s voice, said:
“Who’s there?”
“The governor,” he responded. “Is Mr. Mendenhall at home?”
The woman slid back bolts and opened the door circumspectly. She thrust out a towsled head and shoulders wrapped in a shawl. The governor heard a baby’s cry. The woman’s teeth chattered with nervousness and the cold.
“No, sir; he hasn’t got in yet.”
The governor thanked her and turned away. The woman opened the door wide and watched him as he retreated down the moist brick walk. At the street he paused. Then he turned on toward Second Street. The woman closed the door, and her key grated in the lock.
The governor strode on into Second Street, past the residence of the Bishop of Springfield, standing behind white pillars deep in its naked grove, past St. Agatha’s Seminary sleeping in its gloom, until he reached the state house. The brooding building loomed above him, dark and dour, heaving its great gray dome into the grim night. Huge granite pillars lifted themselves above him, he was lost in the shades of the lofty portico. He unlocked and pushed open the heavy door. The great marble corridors were dark and echoed to the touch of his heel upon the stones. In the wide rotunda, under the enormous dome, thick with billowing gloom, a janitor, the people’s solitary night watch, slept profoundly in his chair, his mouth open, his white beard upon his breast. His gossips had departed. Their deserted chairs stood aimlessly about. He had finished the nightly recital of the strenuous part he had borne in the great rebellion, and he slumbered, his snores echoing in the monstrous inverted bowl above him. The governor ascended to the floor above, and turned down the north corridor. A golden bar of light was thrown across the marble floor. It streamed from the open door of the state treasury. The governor quickened his steps. He heard the lunge of huge bolts as they were tumbled home. He heard the dull spin of a combination lock, and as he reached the treasury two men were emerging from the dark vaults.
“Thank God, that’s—”
The sentence was lost in the mouth of the attorney-general of the state of Illinois, who stood with dropping jaw staring at the governor. The attorney-general stood motionless, and then plunged a hand with three pieces of paper into an outer pocket of his overcoat. Mendenhall stood behind him, a flame flashing over his face.
The governor was the first one to speak.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said.
The two men did not reply, and the governor spoke again.
“Under the law, gentlemen,” he said, “the duty devolves upon me of closing and locking the treasury and temporarily assuming possession of it.”
Still the men did not reply. The tissues of Grigsby’s face had become flaccid, and a greenish shade had overspread them. His eyes had contracted to sharp points under angry brows. The governor scrutinized the two men closely, as he advanced, and said, speaking in a calm tone:
“And so, if you gentlemen have concluded your business”—he paused—“I shall proceed to the execution of that duty.”
“I am,” he added, a moment afterward, “perhaps fortunate in finding you here, Mr. Mendenhall. You may be able to assist me.”
He drew toward them, and they stood aside. He entered the vaults where a gas-jet glimmered, its light glinting on the nickel-plated knobs of the great steel doors. He tried the doors. They were locked. He remained an instant in thought, and then took from his pocket a stick of red sealing-wax. He hesitated another instant.
“No,” he said, “the great seal could not be utilized.”
The great seal of state of the state of Illinois, though it has a political history, is, nevertheless, physically, but a huge overgrown seal such as notaries public use in their little businesses. And in Illinois the governor has no privy seal as he has in some commonwealths. The governor warmed the sealing-wax in the gas-jet that blazed beside him in the vault. When it began to melt he dribbled and daubed its softened substance, drop by drop, on the combination of the huge safe, as a girl would seal a letter. When he had quite covered the lock with the molten wax, he sealed it with the seal ring he wore on his left hand, a ring which bore the coat-of-arms of a colonial governor. The midnight secret of those two men, whatever it might be, was either safe with them or more safely still, sealed with other secrets behind those massive doors. And then he turned the gas down until only a tiny star blinked in the vault, and came out, and swung together the big steel gates that clanked like prison bars, their locks snapping automatically.
He returned to the outer door of the department and placed his hand upon the knob.
“Gentlemen,” he said ceremoniously, “I await your pleasure.”
He bent his gaze full upon William Grigsby, and that little man, throwing back his head with something like defiance, strode on his short legs out of the high-ceiled room, and Mendenhall followed him, but meekly. As they filed past, Grigsby, with face upturned, a face that now in anger had taken on the blue tinge of butchered beef, drew his hands from his overcoat pocket and clasped them behind his back. The governor bowed as the little man and Mendenhall swept out before him. And then he drew the big walnut door to.
Standing out in the corridor Grigsby waited, and as he stood and waited, he fumbled in the outer pocket of his overcoat. Suddenly he drew forth his hand. His face had turned white, the white of a fish’s belly.
As the governor drew the big walnut door to, and as it swung behind him, it pushed before it, scraping with the peevish voice of a ratchet along the matted floor, a piece of crumpled paper. Grigsby, who had turned toward Mendenhall with a look of death’s despair, saw it, and started, a faint ray of hope beaming in his eye. But the paper lay under the governor’s feet.
The governor closed the doors.
“You may lock them, Mr. Mendenhall,” he said.
The assistant state treasurer drew a jingling bunch of keys from his pocket and locked the door. Grigsby’s eyes were fastened on the paper at the governor’s feet. His heart was swelling in his throat. His fingers were twitching, and he was sweating like a stoker. At Mendenhall’s approach the governor placed his foot upon the paper. When Mendenhall had done, the governor picked it up. He smoothed it out in his fingers, and slowly adjusted his glasses. By the dim light that always burns at night just outside the door of the state treasury he read it. Then he placed it in the pocket of his overcoat. He kept his hand upon it. The blue of Grigsby’s face deepened.
The three men went down the stairs, the governor standing aside at the top to let them precede him. They crossed the rotunda, past the slumbering janitor whose snores ascended and exploded in the rounded blackness of the hollow dome, down the east corridor and so out into the darkness. They walked together down the wide stone walk, the stone walk as wide as a street, that sweeps, with a strip of sward down its middle, across the state house lawns to Capitol Avenue. The governor did not turn up Second Street by the way he had come. He kept on with his two companions, and all three were silent. Not a word had any one of them spoken. They were drowned in thought. It matters not of what the assistant state treasurer was thinking. He held only an appointive office. He was a political villain, and had a collar on his neck. The attorney-general was thinking of days that were to come. The governor was thinking of days that were gone. Silent, thoughtful, thus they kept on up Capitol Avenue. When they approached the shades that gathered under the ugly iron bridge which spans the ragged street that leads to the capitol of Illinois, the Alton’s St. Louis Limited came plunging through the town, half an hour late. The three men halted. The great mysterious, vestibuled train, with its darkly curtained Pullmans, slid across the bridge. As they stood waiting for it to pass that they might go under, the governor withdrew his hand from his pocket, the paper still folded in it. He held the paper out toward Grigsby.
“William,” he said, “I think you dropped something.”