“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.”