“Dugmore,” he said in his best official manner, “when His Excellency, Governor Woodford, was here on Sunday he took notice that your general health was not good. So, of his own accord, he has sent you an unconditional pardon for a Christmas gift, and here it is.”
The sick convict's eyes, between their festering lids, fixed on the warden's face and a sudden light flickered in their pale, glazed shallows; but he didn't speak. There was a little pause.
“I said the governor has given you a pardon,” repeated the warden, staring hard at him.
“I heered you the fust time,” croaked the prisoner in his eaten-out voice. “When kin I go?”
“Is that all you've got to say?” demanded the warden, bristling up.
“I said, when kin I go?” repeated No. 874.
“Go!—you can go now. You can't go too soon to suit me!”
The warden swung his chair around and showed him the broad of his indignant back. When he had filled out certain forms at his desk he shoved a pen into the silent consumptive's fingers and showed him crossly where to make his mark. At a signal from his bent forefinger a negro trusty came forward and took the pardoned man away and helped him put his shrunken limbs into a suit of the prison-made slops, of cheap, black shoddy, with the taint of a jail thick and heavy on it. A deputy warden thrust into Dugmore's hands a railroad ticket and the five dollars that the law requires shall be given to a freed felon. He took them without a word and, still without a word, stepped out of the gate that swung open for him and into a light, spitty snowstorm. With the inbred instinct of the hillsman he swung about and headed for the little, light-blue station at the head of the crooked street. He went slowly, coughing often as the cold air struck into his wasted lungs, and sometimes staggering up against the fences. Through a barred window the wondering warden sourly watched the crawling, tottery figure.
“Damned savage!” he said to himself. “Didn't even say thank you. I'll bet he never had any more feelings or sentiments in his life than a moccasin snake.”
Something to the same general effect was expressed a few minutes later by a brakeman who had just helped a wofully feeble passenger aboard the eastbound train and had steered him, staggering and gasping from weakness, to a seat at the forward end of an odorous red-plush day coach.