He looked strangely perturbed, and the nervousness was also in his voice when he said: "I meant to, Bert, but I've had a wire, and I've got to go back to Glendale on this next train"—dragging his watch out of its pocket and glancing at it hurriedly. "Those papers: you've had time enough to think things over, and I'm sure you've made up your mind to do the sensible thing. Let me have them so I can set things in motion before I leave town."
I wondered why he kept jerking his head around to look over his shoulder as he talked, and why the turnkey jingled his keys and waited. But the time for indecision on my part was past and I reached under the blanket for the two papers. With the three-legged stool for a writing-table I was kneeling to put my name at the bottom of the letter to my partners when there were more footsteps in the corridor, hurried ones, this time, and I looked up to see the squarely built, competent figure of our Western lawyer, Benedict, standing in the cell doorway, with the deputy warden, Cummings, backgrounding him.
"Hello, Whitredge; at your old tricks, are you?" snapped the new-comer brusquely. And then to me: "What are you signing there, Bertrand?"
"Nothing, now—without your advice," I said, getting up and handing him the letter.
Whitredge couldn't get out, with Benedict filling the doorway, so he had to stand a cringing second prisoner, looking this way and that, like a rat searching for a hole, while the big Westerner read calmly through the letter which had been written out for me. That moment amply repaid me for much that I had suffered at the hands of Cyrus Whitredge.
"Humph!" said Benedict, folding the letter and thrusting it into his pocket. "Now what's that other document?"
I gave him the petition for pardon, and again he took his time with the reading.
"Nice little scheme you were trying to pull off!" he said to Whitredge, after the petition, accurately refolded, had gone to join the pocketed letter. "You are certainly an ornament to an honorable profession." Then, stepping into the cell and standing aside: "You may go. We'll know where to find you when you're needed."
Whitredge's vanishing was like a trick of legerdemain; one moment he stood before us, and at the next he was gone. At his going, Cummings and the turnkey also disappeared and I was left alone with Benedict. There was a hearty handgrasp to assure me that I was not dreaming, and then I said:
"I had given you up, Benedict. I thought they had you tied hand and foot back yonder in the big hills."