Madeline Braine offered up a silent prayer.
"I knew, I knew," she cried, "that there must be some way out of this! Giles Ilingsworth was miles away at the time when Pallister was killed! The murder took place on April 27th at eleven o'clock in the morning, at the very instant when you and he were riding to Buffalo as fast as steam could carry you! You——"
She sank into her chair and covered her face with her hands.
"I told you he was innocent," she said, smiling through her tears.
There was a tense moment in which Governor Beekman, the prisoner and the two officers stood staring at each other in speechless amazement.
"Can it be possible ...!" exclaimed the Governor at length, and again he consulted his diary. All of a sudden something else on the page that he was looking at caught his eye, and he cried out:
"It was at six o'clock that evening in the Iroquois that I read the murder in the papers. It was that day—it was...." And a moment later he was at his desk rapidly leafing over the printed case for the date of the commission of the crime.
There was no mistake about it. Every witness had it pat. Repeatedly in his opening address and in his summing up the District Attorney had referred to it; three times it appeared in the Court's charge to the jury.
"Phillips," he directed, when his secretary appeared, "call up my office in New York; call up the District Attorney's office in New York; and call up the Bank Le Boeuf in Buffalo. Get them right away, please."
The calls were answered quickly. Once the people at the other end knew the Governor of New York was on the wire, everything was put aside to do his bidding; and at the end of an hour the Governor sank back into his chair with a sigh of satisfaction.