The President was not alone when Tom entered the room. There sat beside the desk a middle-aged woman, worn and weary, her eyes red with weeping, her rusty black dress spotted with recent tears. Her thin hands were nervously twisting the petition someone had prepared for her to present to the President. She looked at him with heartbroken pleading as he turned to her from Tom and resumed his talk with her which Tom's entrance had interrupted.
"So Secretary Stanton wouldn't do anything for you, Mrs. Jenkins?" he asked.
"No, sir; no, Mr. President," sobbed the woman. "He said—he said it was time to make an example and that my boy Jim ought to be shot and would be shot at—at—sunrise tomorrow."
The sentence ended in a wail and the woman crumpled up into a heap and slid down to the floor at the President's feet. She had gained one moment of blessed oblivion. Jim, "the only son of his mother and she a widow," had overstayed his furlough, had been arrested, hurried before a court-martial of elderly officers who were tired of hearing the frivolous excuses of careless boys for not coming back promptly to the front, had been found guilty of desertion, and had been sentenced to be shot in a week. Six days the mother had haunted the crowded anteroom of the stern Secretary of War, bent beneath the burden of her woe. Admitted at last to his presence, her plea for her boy's life had been ruthlessly refused.
"The life of the nation is at stake, madam," Stanton had growled at her. "We must keep the fighting ranks full. What is one boy's life to that of our country? It is unfortunate," the grim Secretary's tones grew softer at the sight of the mother's utter anguish, "it is unfortunate that the life happens to be that of your boy, but an example is needed and an example there shall be. I will do nothing. He dies at sunrise. Good-day."
He rang the bell upon his desk. The sobbing mother was ushered out and the next person on the list was ushered in. An hour afterwards she was with Lincoln. There was no six days' wait at the White House for the mother of a Union soldier.
When she fell to the floor in a faint, Tom sprang to help her, but the President was quicker than he. Lincoln's great arms lifted her like a child and laid her upon a sofa. He touched a bell and sent word to Mrs. Lincoln asking her to come to him. When she did so, she took charge of Mrs. Jenkins and speedily revived her. But it was the President, not his wife, who completed the cure and saved the weeping woman's reason from wreck and her life from long anguish. He pointed to the petition which had fallen from her nerveless fingers to the floor.
"Hand me that paper, Tom."
He put on his spectacles and started to read it. The glasses grew misty with the tears in his eyes. He wiped them with a red bandanna handkerchief, finished reading the paper, and wrote beneath it in bold letters: "This man is pardoned. A. Lincoln, Prest." Then he held the petition close to the sofa so that the first thing Mrs. Jenkins saw as she came back to consciousness in Mrs. Lincoln's arms was Jim Jenkins's pardon. It was that blessed news which made her herself again. She broke into a torrent of thanks, which Lincoln gently waved aside.
"You see, ma'am," said the President, "I don't believe the way to keep the fighting ranks full is to shoot one of the fighters, 'cause he's been a bit careless. There's a Chinese proverb: 'Never drown a boy baby.' I guess that means that if a boy makes a mistake, it's better to give him a chance not to make another. You tell Jim from me to do better after this. Tom, you take Mrs. Jenkins over to the Secretary and show him that little line of mine. He won't like it very much. Usually he has his own way, but sometimes I have mine and this happens to be one of those times. Glad you came to see me, Mrs. Jenkins. There's lots of things you can do to an American boy that are better than shooting him. Here's a little note you can read later, ma'am. Hope it'll help you a bit. Good-by—and God bless you."