The secretary of state lazily pulled off his wet overcoat and flung it across the bed, and then, shaking the water from his broad-brimmed black slouch hat in the careless way they have down in southern Illinois, he tossed it after the coat, on which it fell with a damp slap. He stood six feet in height, and would have been taller had he not stooped. His face was long, his skin dingy and sallow, and his thin nose, beginning between deep-set eyes of steely blue, stretched down the middle of his visage, and precipitated itself over the black mustache that drooped thin and moist about his mouth. His hair, glossy black, though he was fifty, was flung straight across his brow and over his left ear, giving the effect of a mane. Behind, it greased the collar of a long black frock coat that wrapped him lankly. A narrow black tie hung unknotted at his throat. When he moved it was in that loose and lazy way that told, as his hat and his habit did, that he came from the country south of the old O. and M., which divides Egypt from the corn lands of central Illinois. He drew a rocking-chair to the grate, and stretching himself comfortably in it, with his feet upon the ash-strewn fender, drew from his hip pocket a plug of tobacco and gnawed on it. Then he drawled, in a voice haunted by musical echoes of southern ancestry: “What news?” “Why,” replied the attorney-general, “haven’t you heard? Jim Lockhart’s dead.” “The hell he is!” responded Jennings. “I hadn’t heerd ary word. When’d he die?” “This afternoon.” “Sudden?” “Rather.” “What was ailin’ of him?” The attorney-general smiled, a peculiar, mirthless smile. The secretary of state ceased to rock. “You don’t reckon now--” “That’s it exactly.” “I didn’t know it’d got that bad. What’d they give out fer the cause?” “Oh, heart failure, I suppose.” “Beats hell, don’t it?” The secretary of state was silent. Presently he spoke again in an abstracted way: “Well, Jim ’as a devil of a good feller, as good as you’d meet up ’ith in a coon’s age. An’ I reckon when it come to a show-down, he ’as our friend. If the boys ’p’ints an investigatin’ committee--Jim ’as al’ays a leetle too free ’ith the stuff.” Grigsby said “Yes,” in a detached tone. Then there was silence for a space. The bell-boy knocked, bore in his tray and departed. The men nodded over the edges of their little glasses each to the other, and drank. Then Grigsby, wiping his lips, said: “Hank, I didn’t send for you to-night to hold memorial services over Jim Lockhart. There’s something more important than that--there’s something damned important, and it concerns me.” “You?” “Yes, me. I’m in this thing just twenty thousand dollars.” “The hell you are!” “Just--twenty--thousand--dollars.” Grigsby sank into a chair. “Borrowed?” asked Jennings. “Yes.” “Public funds?” “Well--I don’t know. Course--” “Jim Lockhart didn’t have no private fortune--’ithout it ’as the int’rust.” “Well, suppose it was.” “An’thin’ to show fer it?”