“... Just then, Huey came out of the door to the office of the
Governor’s secretary.” (Actually, he had come out of the main double
doors of the anteroom, and was merely pausing at the other point to
impress on White the importance of getting in touch with certain
absentee members.) “We walked toward each other, but instead of the
usual air of greeting I saw a startled, terrified expression, a sort of
look of shock, and simultaneously I saw this fellow who had been
standing in the recess oppose Huey with a little black gun. This was
right within a foot of me, so I threw my hands at him to grab him, just
as he shot, and Murphy Roden--I don’t know where he came from but I
presume he had followed the Senator out into the hall from the inner
office--anyway, at the same instant when I threw my hands and the shot
was fired, Murphy Roden lunged and seized the gun and the man’s hand in
his left hand. This must have been at almost the very instant the shot
was fired, for Murphy’s hand kept the shell of the little automatic from
ejecting, which is why the man whose body was later identified as that
of Dr. Weiss could not fire another shot.
“It is hard to describe in sequence all the things that were happening
in practically one and the same instant. As Murphy grappled with Weiss,
the gesture I had made to push the man away was completed, and my hands
pushed the two struggling men partly to the floor. Weiss had both hands
around his gun, trying to fire again, and this time at Roden; and Roden,
while holding his desperate clutch about the gun which was waving wildly
this way and that, was trying to get his own gun from his shoulder
holster, and I was still standing there with my hands outstretched from
pushing them, when Elliott Coleman from quite a ways down the hall fired
the second shot I heard that night, as well as two others.
“In that same instant of general confusion that boiled up I heard Huey
give just one shout, a sort of hoot, and then he ran like a wild deer. I
bent over to help Roden disarm Weiss, and twisted a muscle in my back so
that for a moment I could not move in any direction. It was then I saw
that one of Elliott Coleman’s bullets had shot away Murphy Roden’s wrist
watch, but the next two hit Weiss. At the first one his whole body
jerked convulsively--like this. At the second it jerked again in a great
twitch as he sank into himself and slumped forward, face down, his head
in the angle of the wall and his legs extended diagonally out into the
corridor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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