Malachi did not read any further. The lights in the car were poor, after all, and then, his eyes were not so good as they used to be. He folded the paper carefully, looked all about, then hid it at last behind him. Then he bestowed his spectacles in his waistcoat pocket, and, like Nora, looked out of the window. They had gone through South Chicago, they had passed One-hundredth Street. They looked out now upon the dull prairies that sprawled flat all about them, with no sign of spring as yet, but dead and desolate, broken only by a black and stunted tree here or there. At wide, wide intervals a lonely gas lamp twinkled bravely in a legal way as if to preserve the prescription of what was only technically a street. The prairies stretched away until they faded into the gray gloom of the March evening, and they had left Chicago at last behind. THE PARDON OF THOMAS WHALEN The private secretary turned reluctantly from his open window beside which the trees bathed their young leaves in the sparkling sunshine of the June morning to confront the throng that awaited audience with the governor. The throng was larger than usual, for the state convention was to be held on the morrow. Every county in the state was represented in the crowd that trampled the red carpet, crushed the leather chairs and blew the smoke of campaign cigars into the solemn faces of former governors standing in their massive gilt frames with their hands on ponderous law books. In one corner a woman huddled, pinching a handkerchief to her eyes. Now and then she sobbed aloud. When Leonard Gilman, the private secretary, saw her he knew it at once for a pardon case, and paid no further attention to her. Big countrymen in Sunday clothes, who wore the red badges of delegates, slapped him on the back, city ward-heelers of checkered lives and garments called him “Len.” There was an odor of perspiration in the room, distinguishable even in the heavy fumes of tobacco. The real leaders, of course, William Handy and the others, were over at the executive mansion, with the governor, completing the final arrangements for his renomination. The governor held the convention in the hollow of his hand.