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.