THE private secretary turned reluctantly from his open window beside which the trees bathed their young leaves in the sparkling sunshine of the June morning to confront the throng that awaited audience with the governor. The throng was larger than usual, for the state convention was to be held on the morrow. Every county in the state was represented in the crowd that trampled the red carpet, crushed the leather chairs and blew the smoke of campaign cigars into the solemn faces of former governors standing in their massive gilt frames with their hands on ponderous law books. In one corner a woman huddled, pinching a handkerchief to her eyes. Now and then she sobbed aloud. When Leonard Gilman, the private secretary, saw her he knew it at once for a pardon case, and paid no further attention to her. Big countrymen in Sunday clothes, who wore the red badges of delegates, slapped him on the back, city ward-heelers of checkered lives and garments called him “Len.”
There was an odor of perspiration in the room, distinguishable even in the heavy fumes of tobacco. The real leaders, of course, William Handy and the others, were over at the executive mansion, with the governor, completing the final arrangements for his renomination. The governor held the convention in the hollow of his hand.
The woman huddled in her corner until eleven o’clock, and then Gilman, happening into her quarter of the room, asked her what she wanted, listening with official respect for her reply. It was an old story to him. When she told him he smiled a strange smile and turned away. At noon the governor ran the gauntlet of the waiting crowd and gained the sanctuary of his private office. Once there, breathing a sigh of relief, he stood for a moment in one of the tall windows looking out upon the smooth lawns stretching lazily in the sun, and rolling away to the elms surrounding the state house. He was a tall man and strong. If he had a physical fault, it was that he carried his head too low, denoting him a thinker, but if his gaze was fixed upon the earth, his thoughts were in the stars. Presently he shook his splendid head vigorously, wrapped his long coat determinedly about him, and settled himself at his desk.
Gilman entered, bearing a pile of papers demanding the governor’s personal attention, but the morning conference was very brief on this day. As Gilman turned to go, the governor said:
“I desire to be alone to-day. I have that speech of acceptance to write. If Handy comes, send him in, but no one else.”
Gilman laid his hand upon the door-knob and the governor asked:
“No one of importance out there, is there?”
“No,” said Gilman. “There’s a woman—what do you think she wants?”
“A pardon, of course.”
“Yes, but for whom? You’d never guess in a thousand years.” Gilman was smiling.
“Then tell me.”
“Tom Whalen!” Gilman laughed at the humor of it.
The governor’s features relaxed with a smile, but quickly his brow contracted again, and he said:
“Well—poor things—I pity them. I could wash my hands in women’s tears every week.”
“Well,” said Gilman, opening the door, “I told her she could see you. I’ll slide her out.”
The governor bent to his desk, but just as the door was closing he called:
“Oh, Gilman!”
Gilman stopped.
“Don’t do that—tell her I’ll see her after a while.”
Gilman, as he returned to his desk, smiled and shook his head at the governor’s weakness.
Thomas Whalen was a life convict in the penitentiary. The crime was committed on the night of the election at which John Chatham had been chosen chief executive of his state. Whalen was a boss in the nineteenth ward and a Chatham man. The campaign had developed such bitterness that Whalen found it necessary to name himself a judge of election in the fourth precinct of his ward. Many times during the day blue patrol wagons had rolled into the precinct.
The polling place of the fourth precinct was a small barber shop in Fifteenth Street. During the evening, as the ballots were being counted, it had become apparent that an altercation was in progress behind the yellow blinds. It was abruptly terminated by a shot. The lights in the shop were extinguished at the same moment. A man burst from the door and fled. When the police arrived, they found a dead election judge face downward on the table. His name had been Brokoski. The bullet had passed entirely through his body, and reddened with his blood the ballots that gushed from the overturned box. The window at his back had been completely shattered by the ball as it flew out into the alley. This was a large bullet, a thirty-eight caliber. The police found a revolver gleaming in the light of the dark lanterns they flashed down the alley. It was a thirty-eight caliber with one empty chamber. It was evident that the murderer had discarded it in his flight. A lieutenant of police at the Market Place police station easily identified the gun as one he had given to Whalen several weeks previously. The judges and clerks had rushed after Whalen. The shock, the sudden failure of light, the horror of the dead man in the dark had jangled their nerves. They were too excited to give a clear account of the affair. They knew that Whalen and Brokoski, sitting on opposite sides of the table, had been quarreling. They had heard the shot, had been blinded by the flash, and had seen Whalen bolt. Brokoski had fallen heavily upon the table, and died with an oath upon his lips.
Gilman never forgot that wild night. He had spent it with the governor at the headquarters of the state central committee. In the dawn, when the east was yellowing, and sparrows began to scuffle and splutter on the eaves of the federal building looming dour just over the way, the news of the murder and frauds had come to them. The governor’s face, white with excitement and fatigue, had suddenly darkened. Had it been the shadow cast by the passing of a great ambition?
At the close of the long day the woman, beckoned by Gilman into the governor’s presence, lingered on the threshold of the chamber. The room was full of shadows. The figure of the governor, standing in the tall window, shut out the waning light, and was silhouetted, big and black, against the twilight sky. He did not hear the woman enter. She coughed to attract his attention. This did not arouse him from his reverie, and after a moment’s timid hesitation, she said:
“May I come in?”
The governor turned. “Be seated, madam,” he said. “I shall be quite frank with you. I am acquainted with this case, and do not believe it to be one justifying executive clemency.”
When she spoke her voice was tremulous.
“Will you hear my story?”
“You may proceed,” the governor replied. He had pushed the papers aside and was drumming lightly with his long, white fingers on his desk.
The woman nervously pleated her handkerchief, fearing to begin. “You must excuse me,” she said presently, “I can not tell my story very well. I do not come here for mercy or anything like that. It is only a matter of justice.”
Had it not been for the gloom, she might have seen a smile steal over the face of the dark figure at the desk. Once plunged into her narrative, her words flowed rapidly, until—suddenly she ceased to speak.
“That was five years ago,” she said, her voice dropping to a sadly reminiscent whisper. “We were to have been married that spring, but—I would rather not tell the rest.”
The woman probably felt her cheeks flush with warmth.
The governor could hear her quick breathing. In a minute he said kindly:
“Well?”
The woman hesitated an instant, and then fairly blurted out the rest of her tale. The governor, through the darkness, saw the woman lean, panting, toward him. Convulsively she pressed her hands to her face. She collapsed in tears. When her sobs became more regular, though still labored, the governor said:
“And Whalen—he knew this?”
“He must have known.”
“Then why did he not tell?”
The woman hung her head and said, in a low voice:
“I was mistaken, sir. The other woman lied.”
“Ah, I see.” The governor turned and looked out of the windows. The old-fashioned iron lamps on the broad steps that led up to the state house were blinking in the dark trees, and the arc light swinging in the street swayed the shadows of their foliage back and forth on the white walks. A flash of heat lightning quivered over the purple outlines of the elms.
The governor sat for a long time in somber silence. The woman could hear the ticking of his watch. Presently he drew it from his pocket and struck a match.
“It is growing late,” he said. “The tale you tell is a very remarkable tale. My time is so fully occupied that it will be impossible for me to devote any thought to it just now. If you will leave your address with my secretary I shall communicate with you. Meanwhile—do not talk.”
When the private secretary had conducted the woman from the room the governor went to his window. The voices of the June night floated up to him, but he no longer heard their music. For the second time, at the name of Whalen, and even in the darkness, there swept over his face the shadow of the passing of a great ambition.
The convention met. The secretary never got down to S in calling the roll of counties, and the governor was renominated by acclamation. But never in all the exciting scenes of those two days, in the black moment of suspense before the roll-call began, in the white instant of agony pending the poll of the Richland County delegation, in the golden hour of triumph, when he stood pale and bending before the mad applause rolling up to him in mighty billows, did he forget the name of Thomas Whalen, or did the face of that woman pass from him. They followed him persistently, they glimmered in his dreams. There was no escape from their pursuit.
After a week in which he found no ease, with the determination that characterized him when once aroused, he undertook a judicial investigation of the case. He obtained a transcript of record, and read it as carefully as if he had been retained in the case and sought error upon which to carry it to the supreme court. In the familiar work he found for a time relief.
Gilman, meanwhile, had forgotten the incident of the woman’s visit. The idea of pardoning Tom Whalen was too preposterous to merit serious consideration. But, when the governor told him to go to the penitentiary and interview Whalen, and then to the city and the locality of the crime for the purpose of learning all he could about Brokoski’s death, he damned himself for having mentioned the fact of the woman’s presence on that crowded, tobacco-clogged, perspiring morning. And as he left the capitol he resolved that his visit should be astonishingly barren of results.
Inside the warden’s private office at the penitentiary he saw Whalen. The man had found the convict’s friend, consumption, and Gilman hardly knew him. When the private secretary told him of the application for his pardon, Whalen only smiled. Gilman found him strangely reticent, and after an effort to induce him to talk, said:
“Whalen, really now, did you kill Brokoski?”
The striped convict picked at the cap he held in his lap. A bitter smile wrinkled his pale, moist face.
“Suspected again, eh?” he said, without looking up.
Finally Whalen tired of the examination. He breathed with difficulty, but that may have been due to his disease. At last he raised his shaven head.
“Mr. Gilman,” he said, “I see what you’re getting at. I have told you I did not commit the crime for which I am here. For that matter, any of the three thousand other prisoners within these walls and wearing these clothes will tell you the same thing. I don’t know whether you believe me or not. It doesn’t make much difference. It doesn’t matter what becomes of me any more. I ain’t long for this world. So just let it drop—what’s the use of opening it up again?”
“But you haven’t answered my question,” said Gilman, interested in spite of himself, for a great fear was growing up within him; “you have not told me who did kill Brokoski.”
The convict lifted his eyelids slowly, and fastened his vision upon his interlocutor. And then he said very deliberately and distinctly:
“No, Mr. Gilman, and I never will!”
Gilman left the penitentiary with more than its gloom upon him. He declined the warden’s effusive invitation to stay to dinner. He wanted to get away. He could not forget the shine in Whalen’s eyes. And the fear within possessed him.
When he reached the city, after dining at the chop house where his old friends foregathered, he went out to Fifteenth Street. Costello had sold his barber shop, and the place had become a saloon. The saloon was quiet that night. Gilman drank with the bartender, and, of course, talked about the Brokoski killing. The bartender had made a study of that case, and discussed it with the curled lip of the specialist.
“They didn’t do a t’ing to Tom but t’row the hooks into ’im all right, all right. It was a case of him in the stripes from the start. Say, them lawyer guys and fly-cops’d frost you.”
Then carefully locating the actors in the tragedy, he reproduced it vividly before Gilman’s eyes. Brokoski had faced the wall where the hole was. Whalen’s back had been to it. Brokoski had sat with his back to the window. The barkeeper plunged his red hands into a drawer, rattled a corkscrew, a knife, a revolver and a jigger, and then drew out a small piece of lead. It was a thirty-eight caliber bullet.
“That’s the boy that done Brokoski,” he said.
“Where did you get it?” asked Gilman, with the mild awe a curio excites in men.
The bartender pointed to a ragged hole in the wainscoting.
“Dug it out o’ there with the icepick. I’m a Sherlock, see? Sure,” he sneered, “it might ’a’ bounced off the Polock’s breast.”
The man wiped his towel over the bar in disgust.
Then seriously:
“On the dead, Mr. Gilman, if Tom had his rights, he’d be sent back to the ward to die.”
Gilman was troubled. He returned in the morning and examined the premises carefully. At two-twenty that afternoon he was on the Limited, flying back to the capital.
That evening he was sitting with the governor in the library of the executive mansion. The windows were open and the odor of lilacs was borne in from the summer night. A negro who had served half a dozen governors, shuffled into the room, bearing a tray.
“That’s excellent whisky,” observed the private secretary.
“That was excellent whisky, Gilman,” said the governor, “before you were born.”
The private secretary was rolling a cigarette. He rolled it with unusual deliberation, licking the rice paper many times before trusting himself to paste it down.
The governor bit the end from a black cigar. A blazing match passed between them.
Then Gilman told of his interview with Whalen. He did not display much spirit in the telling. When he had done, he flecked the ash from his cigarette in a thoughtful way. Resting his forearms on his knees, he regarded the floor between his feet.
“Has it ever struck you as peculiar,” he said, “that the bullet was not introduced in evidence?”
“No,” said the governor, “not very.”
The private secretary paused. When he had done he laughed. The governor was seriously silent for many minutes, and then he said:
“Leonard, I want you to tell me your theory of this whole business.”
Gilman sat up. “Well,” he said, “had it never occurred to you that it would have been significant to determine where that bullet lodged as showing its direction? It bored a hole clear through Brokoski, but at which end had it entered?”
“I presume the medical testimony settled that,” replied the governor. He seemed to find a species of relief in this thought.
“Yes,” Gilman said, “but the medical testimony was bad. It consisted of the conclusions of a young doctor who examined Brokoski’s body after it had grown cold. He accepted Whalen’s guilt as an established fact. He assumed that the bullet entered at the breast. There was then nothing to do but to trace its course through the tissues of the body. If his views were correct, the ball would have lodged somewhere behind Brokoski.”
“But it flew out into the alley,” argued the governor, “and shattered the window in doing so.”
“True,” assented Gilman, “and yet you assume all the while that Whalen fired the shot. Of course the circumstances attending the tragedy, the occasion, the quarrel, Whalen’s flight, and the finding of his gun, lent strong color to that presumption.”
“But the shattered window,” the governor interpolated.
“Yes, and the shattered window. Now,” he continued, “a surgeon, experienced in gunshot wounds, might have been able to distinguish in such a wound as Brokoski’s, the point of the missile’s entrance from the point of exit. Of course it is not certain. The youth the police called did not think such an inquiry important, whereas it was vital. A pistol fired point-blank at a man would blacken his breast with powder. The velocity of the ball, fired at such range might have been sufficient to knock the man over backward, instead of allowing him to fall upon his face as he did. Then, there’s the window. It was shattered, the police said, by the ball. Even the glass in the upper sash was broken. The frame on the outside was blackened by powder, the stains even now being visible. Now, a bullet flying the distance it must have traversed between Whalen’s hand and the window, would, in all probability, simply have perforated the glass with a round, clean hole. But the weapon having been fired in close proximity, the concussion shattered the whole window.”
After a silence Gilman resumed:
“Now then, assume that the bullet entered Brokoski’s back and emerged from his breast. The conclusion deduced from the circumstances I have suggested, is impregnable when that bullet is located in a position in front of Brokoski.”
During the recital the governor lay in his deep chair, his arms across his breast, his finger-tips together. He regarded Gilman through half-closed eyes. A thoughtful observer would have said that he had heard the essential elements of the tale before. When he spoke, after a silence which had begun to annoy the private secretary, he said:
“Well, your hypothesis is tenable. In fact, it is one of the prettiest cases I ever saw put together.”
Gilman stirred uneasily.
“But did you learn anything as to the identity of the person, who, if your suppositions are correct, killed Brokoski?”
“That’s the weak point,” Gilman promptly admitted. “A sufficient motive is utterly lacking, if we eliminate partisan hatred. It was shown that Whalen killed him in an impulse of passion, and that alone saved him from the death penalty. But I feel that my reasoning is valid. The conviction was strengthened by Whalen’s manner and expression the other day. He never killed Brokoski, I tell you.” Gilman smote his thigh for emphasis. “Why he chooses to die in prison a silent martyr I don’t know—but the woman does.”
The governor assumed a sitting posture.
“Damn it!” exclaimed Gilman, after a momentary silence, “if those stupid police had examined the mud in the alley beneath the window that night, they would have found tracks that would have changed the course of this whole business.”
The governor bent farther forward, burying himself in an intense concentration of mind. For a time interminable to Gilman, he sat thus. His cigar went out. The ice in his glass melted, spun on the crystal brim, and sank with a tiny splash and tinkle. The little pile of burned cigarettes, the black ends of consumed cigars, the mass of tobacco ash deposited in a whisky glass, absorbed its tepid liquid, and stunk. The room grew chill, and the mists of the fountain which played in mournful solitude beneath the rocking elms in the grounds, permeated the atmosphere. The brooding night added her terrors and her cares.
Gilman took a sip of liquor, lighted a fresh cigarette, rose, and walked up and down the room. He thought of the election, so near at hand. He looked at the governor bowed there before him. What was Whalen, or the woman, or anybody to him? Let the prisoner die! What was he to the governor? John Chatham’s party needed him, his country needed him, his time needed him, mankind and human progress needed him. If he pardoned Whalen, what was to become of him? The conviction of Brokoski’s murderer alone could save him from such apparent stultification, here on the eve of an election at which, in the foolish phrase of modern politics, he sought vindication. Was this conviction possible? The bare thought halted Gilman beside the governor. He laid a hand on his shoulder.
“These abstruse propositions wouldn’t stand before a jury in a criminal court,” he said. “Let Whalen stay.”
The governor lifted his head.
“But you just now said that he was not Brokoski’s murderer.”
Gilman hesitated. When he spoke, he said:
“A jury of twelve sworn men has said that he is.”
Two days after the private secretary’s return, the newspapers were full of stories concerning his movements. Whalen’s picture was exploited, correspondents sought the governor for interviews, and the Courier charged that, in his desperation, he intended to pardon Whalen, that he might have, in his campaign, the assistance of that skilled and unscrupulous manipulator. The pack of country newspapers took up the Courier’s cry. Whalen’s illness was either ignored, or referred to as feigned, at the direction of prison authorities and the governor. And yet a certificate pigeonholed in Gilman’s desk, signed by the prison physician, stated that Thomas Whalen had pulmonary tuberculosis and was in a moribund condition.
In his office in the city William Handy, the chairman of the state central committee, read these newspaper stories, and swore as he did so. That night the shrewdest and maddest politician in the state stole out of town. The next morning Gilman was surprised when the big man burst through the door marked “private,” brushed by him and entered, unannounced, the governor’s chambers. Before the stately door swung to behind him, Gilman heard him demand:
“What’s all this I hear about your pardoning Tom Whalen?”
The private secretary did not hear the governor’s reply, for with deliberate step he had crossed the room and closed the door. He heard nothing clearly, for Handy’s voice came to him smothered, and the governor’s not at all. Once he thought he heard “mawkish sentiment,” and “the action of a political imbecile,” but what he mostly distinguished was muffled profanity. The young man for the first time in his experience was delighted when his bell buzzed just then. When he entered upon the scene, the governor, rocking complacently in his high-backed chair, was saying:
“But what if it’s my duty?”
“Duty be damned!” shouted Handy, rising to his feet, and smiting the desk with a heavy fist he had had folded during the conversation. The wrath which the politician had kept bottled up overnight had burst out at last.
“I am running this campaign,” he cried, “and as long as I do run it, I do not propose to tolerate such incredible folly as pardoning Tom Whalen.”
Gilman, wide-eyed, gazed in amaze at the two men. Handy stood glaring at the governor, his fist fastened where it had fallen. The governor’s lips were tightly compressed. A sheet of scarlet swept over his dark face. Both men were strong-willed. The tensity of such a moment could not long endure. Its contagion spread to Gilman’s nerves. The governor’s splendid frame seemed to dilate, and Gilman suddenly became conscious that the admiration he had always given the man had never before measured up to the fullness of John Chatham’s deserts. It was with relief that he saw the governor’s glance turn from Handy to bend on him.
“Gilman,” he said, “have a pardon made out for Thomas Whalen.”
This answer to Handy’s threats was punctuated by a flash from the governor’s eyes.
“And Gilman—” the governor continued.
“Yes, sir.”
“Wire that woman—what’s her name?”
“Barry?”
“Yes—Barry—wire her to come. I think I shall prefer to tell her myself.”
Handy dropped, heavy with exhaustion, into his chair. He tried to speak, but had trouble with his articulation. When he mastered his tongue, he could only blurt:
“Now you have done it, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” said the governor in gentle assent, “I have done it.” The sigh that ended this remark was one in which a heart-burdening care was dissipated. It was a sigh that resolved a vast difficulty.
When the woman came the next morning, Gilman led her at once into the governor’s presence. Before him lay a large document, lettered in preposterous script, lined in red ink. The woman knew this imitation parchment to be the pardon of Thomas Whalen. The governor rose and stood until she had seated herself, and then said, drawing the pardon on the desk to him, “I have decided to grant the application for Whalen’s pardon.”
The woman’s fingers clawed the carved arms of the chair. Gilman stared with parted lips. The governor continued as he hastily scanned the pardon:
“I take this action because circumstances recently revealed lead me to believe that Whalen is innocent.”
The governor dipped his pen in the ink.
“They form a very abstruse proposition,” he said, poising his pen nicely in his fingers, “and I am not sure that every one can grasp it.”
The governor spoke meditatively. The two persons in the room silently regarded him. Something in the man, in the moment, impelled awe. He set his hand to the paper to write, but paused an instant longer. His eyes wandered from the document. As he raised them over her, the woman bowed her head. Out through the open window, out through the summer morning, over the wimpling foliage of the trees, far, far away they gazed. And then he sighed, as a woman sighs, and turning, signed the pardon of Thomas Whalen. A moment he sat still as an ancient statue, and then dropping the pen on the desk, he turned toward Gilman with a smile. The action relieved the young man from the spell which bound him.
“Are you going before the people with that story I worked up?” he cried.
Fiercely, without awaiting a reply to a question already answered, he wheeled on the woman.
“Do you see what he has done? He has given up all—he has killed himself! He says Whalen is innocent—and doesn’t even know upon whom to fasten suspicion! Don’t you—my God, woman—can’t you see?”
Slowly the situation was borne in upon her understanding. Her mouth opened with a gasp, her eyes widened.
“Why!” she said, jerking her words from a choking throat. “He knows who did it. I told him. It was—me.”
The door latch clicked behind her. She turned in the direction whence came the sound, and repeated, as if the interrupter contradicted her:
“Yes, I did it. I killed Brokoski.”
Her strength failed her. She sobbed convulsively.
“Yes—I—did—it,” she repeated. “I—did—it.”
Gilman stared in wonder. Here, then, was the person who had stood in the alley beneath the window that night, whose footprints would have led him to the solution of his mystery, to the end of his clever chain. The problem of her motive for slaying Brokoski alone remained. He longed to ask her, but she had collapsed unconscious in her chair. Turning to the governor he implored light. A word informed him of the accidental killing of Brokoski by a jealous woman who was trying to shoot his vis-à-vis. Then he demanded in tones reproachful:
“Why did you not tell me this?”
“Because,” the man quietly responded, “I do not war on women.”
The door whose latch had clicked had opened wide, and William Handy entered, smiling.
Governor Chatham was assorting papers on his desk, as a man would whose routine work had received a trifling interruption. Handy remained on his feet.
“John,” he said, “John, I take off my hat to you. I admire your nerve. I recognized it years ago, that day you presided over our convention in the old seventh district—remember?—the day you turned me down so hard. Remember?”
The governor smiled.
“This ain’t flattery,” said Handy, seating himself in a leather chair. “You’re not only all I’ve said, you’re a devil of a good fellow to boot.”
Handy spoke seldom. He never wrote letters, but sent word, according to an ancient maxim uttered by one of the political fathers. But when he did speak, he spoke bluntly, in the same tone in which he would have called a man a liar. The governor raised his hand to stay Handy’s compliments.
“Yes, John,” he persisted. “You’re a hell of a good fellow, but,” he added, “you’re a damn poor politician.”
There was the faintest shadow of a smile on the governor’s face. Handy closed his eyes until they were the merest slits. He puffed his cigar back to life.
His head was wrapped in scarfs of smoke.
“When does the grand jury sit?” he inquired, after a time.
“Not till the December term.”
“We can have a special one impaneled. I’ll have Donnelly call it.”
Donnelly was a judge of dignity and erudition, and Handy spoke of him as if he were his hired man, which he was.
“The boys’ll be glad to get Tom back in the nineteenth. O’Rourke says—”
“Look here, Handy,” said the governor, whirling about in his chair, and speaking as sharply as a precinct captain at a primary. “I want none of Tom Whalen’s work in the nineteenth—not while I’m running for governor. But then,” he added gravely, “he’s only going back to the nineteenth to die.”
Handy grunted. “Well, I’ll have Fitzgerald pinch the girl anyway, and keep her in the Division Street station till after election.”
The governor looked at Handy. “William,” he said, “you might as well understand now, that that would be wholly useless. I am convinced of Whalen’s innocence absolutely, beyond all doubt, but it will be impossible to get a jury to convict the one who did kill Brokoski on such evidence as convinced me.”
“But she confesses,” urged Handy.
“To whom?”
“To you.”
“Exactly. But what if that confession be a privileged communication?”
Handy looked up in amazement. “You don’t mean you wouldn’t testify?”
The governor’s countenance lost its legal expression, and became suddenly human. If Handy had been a thinner man he would have jumped when the governor said:
“Do you think I would send a woman to the penitentiary to elect myself governor?”
“Are you sure confessions to a governor are privileges?” inquired Handy, who was adhering to practical things.
The governor’s face put on its legal mask again, and he replied:
“Well, the question is unsettled—”
“Who presides in the criminal court this winter?” inquired Handy, “any of our fellows?” Handy’s whole philosophy of life was pull. The governor resumed, without answering:
“The question has never been decided. Mr. Chief Justice Marshall, upon the trial of Aaron Burr, ruled, if I remember, that a subpœna duces tecum might be issued to the president for a letter addressed to him, leaving the question of the production of the letter—”
“Oh, say, John,” broke in Handy, “Burr’s dead, isn’t he? And he wasn’t a good fellow, anyway, or he’d never got in that far. Go on with your legalities—I myself do not propose to go to jail for contempt for refusing to testify.”
“You?”
“Yes, me.”
“What have you to do with it?”
“Oh, nothing much,” said Handy, “only I happened to be inside that door just now when she confessed—and there’s Gilman besides.” Handy, his cigar tilted upward, smoked on voluminously and smiled through the smoke with deep satisfaction. The governor averted his face. Lines of trouble drew themselves across his brow. Presently he turned to the chairman.
“Handy,” he said, “I may be reëlected and I may not—probably not. However that may be, I insist upon this: I want that woman, for the present, let alone. I have faith in the people. I am willing to go to them on my record. They may or may not reëlect me. I shall not, at any rate, have my motives impugned. I only want, when the turmoil has subsided, when the subject can be viewed with clear eyes and investigated by clear heads and clean hands, to see justice done.”
“Oh,” said Handy, “to hell with justice.”
“Well, then,” asked the governor, “what do you say to a little mercy now and then?”