“I had a-plenty,” he explained, “but I met a man who asked me to change a bill for him. He got the change, but I’m looking for him to get the bill. I don’t know, to save my life, how he got away. I still have his umbrella that he asked me to hold.”
Gordon smiled and loaned him the money.
“I don’t ask you for any references. You are the real thing, my boy.”
A woman in mourning, whom he recognised immediately from her published pictures, asked him to champion the cause of her son, who was under sentence of death.
Gordon readily recalled the case as a famous one. He had followed it with some care and was sure from the evidence that the young man was guilty.
For a half hour she poured out her mother’s soul to him in piteous accents.
“My dear madam,” he said at last, “I cannot possibly undertake such work.”
“Then who will save him? I’ve tramped the streets of New York for six months and appealed to every man of power. Your voice raised in protest against this shameful and unjust death will turn the tide of public opinion and save him. You can’t refuse me!”
“I must refuse,” he answered firmly.
She turned pale, and her mouth twitched nervously. He looked into her white face with a great pity and a feeling of horror swept his heart. The pathos and the agony of the tragedy filled him with strange foreboding. In his imagination he could hear the click of handcuffs on his own wrists and feel the steel of prison bars on his own hands as he peered through the grating toward the gate of Death.