Physicians state that Heney’s escape from death was by a hair’s breadth. Had the bullet, striking as it did, taken any other course death would have been inevitable.
See [Chapter XXIII].
“Will they,” demanded The Call the morning after Heney had been shot down, “stop at nothing? Are not stealing, perjury, bribery, dynamiting, murder, enough? Must the course of justice in this community run the gamut of violence, as well as of slander and pettifogging obstruction?
“Apparently it must. But there is at least no longer any reason to doubt where the responsibility lies. A bare chance, the momentary tremor of an assassin’s hand, may have saved the life of Francis J. Heney to this community. There will be no tremor in the finger of scorn that points past the miserable wretch that did the shooting to the men that inspired it. A worthless crank, of course. It always is. Dirty hands for dirty work. But softer hands and keener brains plan it. And the community will waste no wrath on the miserable tool, now cowering in jail. It was not he who has dogged the steps of Francis J. Heney these two years with hired thugs. It was not he who has filled the courtrooms with professional ruffians. It was not he who dynamited Gallagher—or hired it done. Least of all was it he who made a joke of that crime and sought to make a joke and a byword of the heroic Heney—‘poor Beany.’”
While Heney lay wounded at San Francisco, and Haas lay dead, another tragedy growing out of the Graft Prosecution was being enacted on the other side of the globe. John Krause, who had been T. V. Halsey’s assistant at the time of the Pacific States Telephone briberies, killed himself on the steamer Adriatic as it plied from Cherbourg, France, to Queenstown, Ireland. Krause had disappeared from San Francisco in December, 1907. It was never charged that Krause was a principal to the bribery transactions, or that he had even guilty knowledge of them. His only possible connection with the graft cases was as a witness against the Pacific States Telephone and Telegraph Company officials.
“A great work,” said Hiram W. Johnson, in an interview printed in the San Francisco Call, November 14, 1908, “undertaken and accomplished, though not yet wholly completed, has been retarded for a day by an assassin’s bullet. When Frank Heney fell today while in the performance of his duty, decency and the right were stricken. For two years this one man has persevered in the right, for right’s sake alone. Without compensation, sacrificing a great legal practice, giving without complaint the best years of his life, Francis J. Heney, facing all the combined forces of evil in this community and State, has stood unflinchingly at his post, making the fight that is the fight of all of us. Daily abuse and vilification have been his portion and reward. In spite of it, where a weaker man would have faltered, Heney has persevered. He has done in seeking to make equality before the law an assurance in this State, all that a strong and a brave man could do. Were he to pass away tonight he’d need no other monument than the work he has done. For generations his expose of rottenness in San Francisco, his prosecutions of the criminal rich will live and make this city and State better. He has been shot simply because he was fighting for the right. Not alone has he been wounded; but the community and the commonwealth have suffered the injury.