“We may as well be frank,” said Griswold in his most professional voice. “I don’t want the federal authorities to take these men; it is important that they should not do so. This is an affair between the governors of the two Carolinas. It has been said that neither of them dares press the matter of arrest, but I am here in Governor Osborne’s behalf to give the lie to that imputation.”
“That has undoubtedly been the fact, as you know,” and Habersham smiled at his old preceptor inquiringly. “Osborne once represented the Appleweights, and he undoubtedly saved the leader from the gallows. That was before Osborne ever thought of becoming governor, and he acted only within his proper rights as a lawyer. I don’t recall that anything in professional ethics requires us to abandon a client because we know he’s guilty. If such were the case we’d all starve to death.”
“Governor Osborne has been viciously maligned,” declared Griswold. “While he did at one time represent these people—no doubt thoroughly and efficiently—he holds the loftiest ideal of public service, and it was only when his official integrity was brought into question by unscrupulous enemies that he employed me as special counsel to carry this affair through to a conclusion. That accounts for my presence here, Habersham, and, with your assistance, I propose to force Governor Dangerfield’s hand. Suppose all these people were arrested in Mingo County under these indictments, what would be the result—trial and acquittal?”
“Just that, in spite of any effort made to convict them.”
“Well, Governor Osborne is tired of this business, and wants the Appleweight scandal disposed of once and for all.”
“That’s strange,” remarked Habersham, clearly surprised at Griswold’s vigorous tone. “I called on the governor in his office at Columbia only ten days ago, and he put me off. He said he had to prepare an address to deliver before the South Carolina Political Reform Association, and he couldn’t take up the Appleweight case; and I called on Bosworth, the attorney-general, and he grew furiously angry, and said I was guilty of the gravest malfeasance in not having brought those men to book long ago. When I suggested that he connive with the governor towards removing our sheriff, he declared that the governor was a coward. He seemed anxious to put the governor in a hole, though why he should take that attitude I can’t make out, as it has been generally understood that Governor Osborne’s personal friendliness for him secured his nomination and election to the attorney-generalship, and I have heard that he is engaged to the governor’s oldest daughter.”
“He is a contemptible hound,” replied Griswold with feeling, “and at the proper time we shall deal with him; but it is of more importance just now to make Appleweight a prisoner in North Carolina. If he’s arrested over there, that lets us out; and if the North Carolina authorities won’t arrest their own criminals, we’ll go over into Dilwell County and show them how to be good. The man’s got to be locked up, and he’d look much better in a North Carolina jail, under all the circumstances.”
“That’s good in theory, but how do you justify it in law?”
“Oh, that’s the merest matter of formulæ! My dear Habersham, all the usual processes of law go down before emergencies!”
The airiness of Griswold’s tone caused the prosecutor to laugh, for this was not the sober associate professor of admiralty whose lectures he had sat under at the University of Virginia, but a different person, whose new attitude toward the law and its enforcement shocked him immeasurably.