A woman's agonized shriek, a man's curse, a chance shot into the dark from his ever-ready revolver, a scuffle,--a very brief scuffle,--and then all was as still as before. Estelle had told her last lie; Fitzpatrick had dispensed his last drink.
Moss walked forward to the doorway, waited quietly until an officer who had heard the report of the revolver came running up, and then surrendered himself.
"I done kill 'em," he explained laconically.
Ten minutes later, in heavy manacles, he stepped down from the police ambulance at the entrance to the jail--a huge brick building, covering an entire block, with its barred windows rising story on story, a somber architectural jest at Civilization.
Some two months later, the governor of Kentucky was standing with his hands in his pockets at the window of his office, in the quaint capitol building at Frankfort, and gazing idly at the tablet in the sidewalk which marks the spot where William Goebel fell, the victim of an assassin's ball. He turned, at the rustle of a lady's skirts.
"Why, Pen! What angel sent you?" he exclaimed, pushing forward his easiest chair. "Pen, do you know you're just in time to save the gov'neh of Kentucky from a spell of the blues? It's a fact. I read a book last night, by a man named Buckle, about civilization and that sawt of thing, and the pesky thoughts stick to me like a nightmare. I was standin' by that window theh, just reviewin' the events which have taken place in our deah old State in the past quarter of a century, and I was askin' myself which way we were headed--up or down."
"Up, surely," answered Mrs. Harper. She looked at him with that candor and seriousness which is permitted only between old friends, and then continued: "Wilbur, I have a problem, too, and I want you to help me solve it. I want you to pardon a negro who was convicted last June in Louisville of a double murder, and who is now here in the penitentiary. He is the son of that Benjy of ours that ran off during the War, and the grandson of our old Moss. You remember them both. I never knew either of them to be guilty of a vicious act, and this boy--he's only twenty-five--killed his wife and the white man who had debauched her."
The governor sat playing with his pen-knife for some time after she had finished her story.