They were given rooms directly across the hall from the one in which physicians strove unremittingly to save Huey Long’s life. He had not been a very devoted family man. He was away from home too much in the pursuit of objectives it seemed impossible for him to share with the Rose McConnell he had met when he was a brash young door-to-door salesman of Cottolene. Those days were now so long in the past, the happy days of shared trial when every penny had to be stretched to the uttermost. Success had come so quickly--the big ornate home in Shreveport, the new Executive Mansion at Baton Rouge of which Rose had been the first chatelaine, the elaborate residence on Audubon Boulevard, the days of triumph and rejoicing that followed the effort to impeach him.... All of it was now slipping away forever, while Huey Long’s blood seeped slowly but relentlessly out of his body, with no possibility short of a miracle of halting its ebb as some physician, now forever anonymous, made on his hospital chart a final entry to the effect that even “the oxygen tent discontinued as pt. grew very restless under it--delusions of photographers, etc.” Once hope for the patient had been abandoned, it was Seymour Weiss who was the nuncio bringing to the members of Huey’s family, in the room across the hall, tidings of great grief. Himself emotionally shaken to the depths of his being, he told Mrs. Long and the three children as gently as possible that the end was very near. They followed him across the hall to the bed where the dying man, barely conscious, was drawing in and expelling shallow, noisy breaths. He made no effort to speak; but as each of the four laid a hand on the bed beside him, he managed weakly to pat it in a final, caressing gesture of farewell. They returned to their room to await the end. Seymour Weiss accompanied them, giving voice to whatever comforting phrases he could muster, and then returned to the sickroom. One vital point remained to be cleared up. “Huey, Huey, can you hear me?” he asked. There was a faint stir of response. “Huey, you are seriously hurt. Everything that can be done to help you is being done, but no one can ever say how such things will turn out. Now is the time to tell me where you put the papers and things that you took out of the bank vault. Where did you put them? Tell me where they are, Huey. Please don’t wait any longer.” Thus the final thoughts he carried with him out of his life concerned a political campaign, his campaign for the presidency of the United States. Hardly audible was the faint breath that whispered: “Later--I’ll--tell--you--later....” They were his last words. The secret of what became of the affidavits, the other documents, and the campaign funds that were to provision his presidential race was one he took with him to an elaborate tomb newly constructed in the very center of the landscaped park around the capitol he had built for Louisiana. 11 ---- THE AFTERMATH