“No, sir, can’t nothing be done for Eph. I been to the other governor a’ready. He’s in Sing Sing for the rest of his life. He got mad years ago and cut a man terrible so he died and they sent him up the river for it but it’s Ollie that’s worrying me. Ollie’s only nineteen years old. Ollie killed a man, Governor, and I ain’t defending him but it was in a fair fight. Ollie shot to save his own life.”
“He did not claim he shot in self-defense? A man has a right to defend himself, in law, Mrs. Witten,” Roosevelt said.
“Well, they brought out in the trial that the other feller was shot in the back and didn’t have a gun with him. But he was heading for where it stood, Governor, Ollie said so and I believe him. Ollie was just smart and shot quick, knowing the other feller was a crack shot and would get him from a long ways off. Now they’re sending Ollie up where his father is, and I got nobody to depend on but Clint, and he ain’t just right in his head, and I got three little ones, all girls. Clint forgets everything. Come in from the field and wander off to town and leave the mules out there hitched to the plow all night if the children and I didn’t go out and fetch ’em in. I’ve finished many a field myself, leaving my children playing in a furrow.” She twisted her thin hands together, casting reproachful glances at Clint, whose stolid face showed no emotion whatever.
Roosevelt looked with some compassion at the woman’s ravaged face and thin body. How many such would he see in the next two years, harassed, frightened women, all desperately pleading mercy for violent-tempered husbands or sons? For an instant the prospect appalled him and briefly he dreaded the heavy responsibility of a great human population.
Then sober judgment came, steadying his nerves, and he spoke in a calm, fatherly voice. “Mrs. Witten, I know nothing of the facts in this case of your son. A man who shoots another in the back condemns himself from the first in the minds of all sober men.”
“I been tellin’ Ma that,” stated Clint, speaking for the first time in a voice surprisingly masculine and deep coming from such an undersized, emaciated body. “All the way down here I told her it was a waste of money comin’ way down here just to see you. Them was good cows we sold to pay for it too.”
“You know I’m not yet governor of New York,” Roosevelt reminded her. “I have no legal right to do anything about any case, especially one that has been already settled in the courts and the defendant convicted. What possible defense could your son have for shooting an unarmed man in the back? Didn’t he testify in his own defense?”
“He swore he thought that feller—Morgan Tuttle was his name—was going after his gun and Ollie knowed Morgan was a dead shot. He could have killed Ollie from a hundred yards off and Ollie knowed it. They was huntin’ together up in the mountains.”
“That was what the fight was about,” put in Clint. “Deer they shot up in them hills. Morgan wasn’t going to divide fair.”
“Was that the legal season to kill a deer?” Roosevelt asked. “I thought they were protected by law.”