XV
The incident, like that on which the story itself was founded, occurred in the course of another effort to induce the Governor to save a poor wretch from the gallows. The autumn preceding, just when the World’s Fair at Chicago was at its apogee, a half-crazed boy had assassinated Carter Harrison, the old mayor of that city, and had been promptly tried and condemned to death. The time for the execution of the sentence drew on, and two or three days before the black event I had a telegram from Peter Dunne and other newspaper friends in Chicago asking me to urge the governor, or the acting governor as it happened at that time to be, to commute the sentence to one of imprisonment for life. The boy, so the telegrams said, was clearly insane, and had been at the time of his crazy and desperate deed; his case had not been presented with the skill that might have saved him, or at least might have saved another in such a plight; there had been the customary hue and cry, the most cherished process of the English law, “and,” Dunne concluded, “do get Joe Gill to let him off.”
Joe Gill was Joseph B. Gill, the young Lieutenant-Governor of the state, and because Governor Altgeld was just then out of the state he was on the bridge as acting governor. Gill had been one of the Immortal 101, and as a representative had made a record in support of certain humane measures in behalf of the miners of the state. The newspaper correspondents had had pleasure in celebrating him and his work in their despatches, and because of his popularity among the miners, to say nothing of his popularity among the newspaper men, he had been nominated for lieutenant-governor on the ticket with Altgeld. There was in our relations a camaraderie which put any thought of presumption out of the question; besides, I was always so much opposed to the killing of human beings, especially to that peculiarly horrible form of killing which the state deliberately and in cold blood commits under the euphemism of “capital punishment,” that I was always ready to ask any governor to commute a sentence of death that had been pronounced against anybody; so that it seemed a simple matter to ask Joe Gill, himself the heart of kindness, to save the life of this boy whose soul had wandered so desperately astray in the clouds which darkened it.
Early the next morning—the telegrams had come at night—I went over to the governor’s office, and the governor’s private secretary told me that Lieutenant-Governor Gill had not yet appeared, and as a good secretary, anxious to protect his chief, he asked:
“What do you want to see him about?”
“This Prendergast they’re going to hang in Chicago next Friday.”
At this a man sitting in the room near the secretary’s desk looked up with a sudden access of intense interest; and, starting from his chair and transfixing me with a sharp glance, he asked:
“What interest have you in the Prendergast case?”
“None,” I said, “except that I don’t want to have him, or anybody, hanged.”
On the man’s face, tired, with the expression of world-weariness life gives to the countenance behind which there has been too much serious contemplation of life, a face that seemed prematurely wrinkled, there suddenly appeared a smile as winning as a woman’s, and he said in a voice that had the timbre of human sympathy and the humor of a peculiar drawl: