The convict lifted his eyelids slowly, and fastened his vision upon his interlocutor. And then he said very deliberately and distinctly: “No, Mr. Gilman, and I never will!” Gilman left the penitentiary with more than its gloom upon him. He declined the warden’s effusive invitation to stay to dinner. He wanted to get away. He could not forget the shine in Whalen’s eyes. And the fear within possessed him. When he reached the city, after dining at the chop house where his old friends foregathered, he went out to Fifteenth Street. Costello had sold his barber shop, and the place had become a saloon. The saloon was quiet that night. Gilman drank with the bartender, and, of course, talked about the Brokoski killing. The bartender had made a study of that case, and discussed it with the curled lip of the specialist. “They didn’t do a t’ing to Tom but t’row the hooks into ’im all right, all right. It was a case of him in the stripes from the start. Say, them lawyer guys and fly-cops’d frost you.” Then carefully locating the actors in the tragedy, he reproduced it vividly before Gilman’s eyes. Brokoski had faced the wall where the hole was. Whalen’s back had been to it. Brokoski had sat with his back to the window. The barkeeper plunged his red hands into a drawer, rattled a corkscrew, a knife, a revolver and a jigger, and then drew out a small piece of lead. It was a thirty-eight caliber bullet. “That’s the boy that done Brokoski,” he said. “Where did you get it?” asked Gilman, with the mild awe a curio excites in men. The bartender pointed to a ragged hole in the wainscoting. “Dug it out o’ there with the icepick. I’m a Sherlock, see? Sure,” he sneered, “it might ’a’ bounced off the Polock’s breast.” The man wiped his towel over the bar in disgust. Then seriously: “On the dead, Mr. Gilman, if Tom had his rights, he’d be sent back to the ward to die.” Gilman was troubled. He returned in the morning and examined the premises carefully. At two-twenty that afternoon he was on the Limited, flying back to the capital. That evening he was sitting with the governor in the library of the executive mansion. The windows were open and the odor of lilacs was borne in from the summer night. A negro who had served half a dozen governors, shuffled into the room, bearing a tray. “That’s excellent whisky,” observed the private secretary. “That was excellent whisky, Gilman,” said the governor, “before you were born.” The private secretary was rolling a cigarette. He rolled it with unusual deliberation, licking the rice paper many times before trusting himself to paste it down. The governor bit the end from a black cigar. A blazing match passed between them. Then Gilman told of his interview with Whalen. He did not display much spirit in the telling. When he had done, he flecked the ash from his cigarette in a thoughtful way. Resting his forearms on his knees, he regarded the floor between his feet.