“If you are not guilty, Tate, now is the time for you to speak. I want you to say so before Avery; that’s what I’ve brought him here for. I don’t want to make a mistake. If you say you believe Avery to be guilty, I will not sign his pardon.”
He waited, watching Tate’s hands as they opened and shut weakly; they seemed, as they lay inert upon the table, to be utterly dissociated from him, the hands of an automaton whose mechanism worked imperfectly. A sob, deep, hoarse, pitiful, shook his burly form.
The governor sat down, took a bundle of papers from his pocket, slipped one from under the rubber band which snapped back sharply into place. He drew out a pen, tested the point carefully, then, steadying it with his left hand, wrote his name.
“Warden,” he said, waving the paper to dry the ink; “thank you for your trouble. You will have to go home alone. Avery is free.”
IV
When Burgess appeared at the bank at ten o’clock the next morning he found his friends of the night before established in the directors’ room waiting for him. They greeted him without their usual chaff, and he merely nodded to all comprehendingly and seated himself on the table.
“We don’t want to bother you, Web,” said Colton, “but I guess we’d all feel better if we knew what happened after we left you last night. I hope you don’t mind.”
Burgess frowned and shook his head.
“You ought to thank God you didn’t have to see the rest of it! I’ve got a reservation on the Limited tonight: going down to the big city in the hope of getting it out of my mind.”
“Well, we know only what the papers printed this morning,” said Ramsay; “a very brief paragraph saying that Avery had been pardoned. The papers don’t tell the story of his crime as they usually do, and we noticed that they refrained from saying that the pardon was signed at one of your dinner parties.”