“And Mrs. Smith?”
“She’s in reading the Bible to Sol. I don’t know whether it’s doing him any good or not; he says ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and ‘That’s right’ to every question she asks him; but I guess some of it’s politeness. And he seems kinder flighty, and his mind runs from one thing to another. But he says he’s still hoping. He’s made a list of all his things to give away; and he’s said good-bye to the newspaper boys. I never supposed that youngest one had any feeling, but I had to give him four fingers of whiskey after he come out; he was white’s the wall, and he hadn’t a word to say. It’s been a terrible day, Amos. My woman’s jest all broke up; she wanted me to make a rope-ladder. Me! Said she and old Lady Smith would hide him. ‘Polly,’ says I, ‘I know my duty; and if I didn’t, Amos knows his.’ She ’ain’t spoke to me since, and we had a picked-up dinner. Well, I can’t eat!”
“You best not drink much either, then, Joe,” said Amos, kindly; and he went his ways. Dark and painful ways they were that night: but he never flinched. And the carpenters on the ghastly machine without the gate (the shadow of which lay, all night through, on Amos’s curtain) said to each other, “The sheriff looks sick, but he ain’t going to take any chances!”
The day came—Sol’s last day—and there were a hundred demands for Amos’s decision. In the morning he made his last stroke for the prisoner. He told Raker about it. “I found the tool at last,” he said, “in the place you suspected. Dago dagger. I’ve expressed it to Miss Graves and telegraphed her. It’s in her hands now.”
“Sol says he ’ain’t quit hoping,” says Raker. “Say, the blizzard flag is out; you don’t think you could put it off for weather, being an outdoor thing, you know?”
“No,” says Amos, knitting his black brows; “I know my duty.”
Towards night, in one of his many visits to the condemned man, Sol said, “Elly’ll be sure to come back from Des Moines in—in time, if she don’t succeed, won’t she?”
“Oh, sure,” said Amos, cheerfully. He spoke in a louder than common voice when he was with Sol; he fought against an inclination to walk on tiptoe, as he saw Raker and the watch doing. He wished Sol would not keep hold of his hand so long each time they shook hands; but he found his hands going out whenever he entered the room. He had a feeling at his heart as if a string were tightening about it and cutting into it: shaking hands seemed to loosen the string. From Sol, Amos went down-stairs to the telephone to call up the depot. The electricity snapped and roared and buzzed, and baffled his ears, but he made out that the Des Moines train had come in two hours late; the morning train was likely to be later, for a storm was raging and the telegraph lines were down. Elly hadn’t come; she couldn’t come in time! Amos changed the call to the telegraph office.
Yes, they had a telegram for him. Just received; been ever since noon getting there. From Des Moines. Read it?
The sheriff gripped the receiver and flung back his shoulders like a soldier facing the firing-squad. The words penetrated the whir like bullets: “Des Moines, December 8, 189-. Governor refused audience. Has left the city. My sympathy and indignation. T. L. Dennison.”