They sat upon the thrones of power. They dragged a woman from her humble roof and thrust her into a dungeon. They chose nine soldiers to try her for the murder of their Commander-in-Chief. They chained her to the bar along with seven men. They baited her for weeks with their Montgomerys and Conovers, their Weichmans and Lloyds, the spawn of their bureau, dragooned by terror or suborned by hope. They shouted into the ears of the court appeal on appeal for her head. And, when at last five of their chosen sons sickened at the task, and shrank from shedding a woman's blood, they procured the death-sentence by a trick. They forged the death-warrant by another. They turned thimble-riggers under the very shadow of the gallows. They cheated their own court. They cheated their own President. They cheated the very executioner. They sneaked a woman into the arms of death by sleight-of-hand. They played their confidence game with the King of Terrors. They managed to hide the cheat from the country until they quarreled with their new Commander-in-Chief. Then ensued an interval of ambiguous mutterings, dark equivocations, private accusation, private defenses. From one side: "I never saw the paper." From the other: "It was right before his eyes." The twin ex-Judge-Advocates, at length, brace each other up to the sticking-point and venture on an appeal to the public. The ex-President, thus driven at bay, fulminates the secret infamy in all its foul extent to the whole world. Thereupon, Great Nemesis finds her opportunity, and makes these once high-placed, invulnerable woman-slayers the sport of her mighty hands. Every one, as if coerced by some magic power, comes at last to act as though he were afraid of the other, and, willing or unwilling, contrives to show how profoundly base the others are. Stanton slinks mysteriously into the shadow of death, refusing to cut his co-conspirator down from the gibbet where the dreaded Johnson has swung him. Bingham, standing like an Indian with a single female scalp bleeding from his girdle, presses his finger to his lips until Stanton and Seward die. Speed, with the obnoxious petition pressed again and again to his nostrils, feebly yet persistently refuses to open his mouth. Holt pictures the dead Johnson exulting even in Hell over the silence of his old Attorney-General; blasts the character of Stanton by ascribing his injunction of silence to a motive the most diabolic; and, unconscious seemingly that he does it, at the same time ruins the credit of Bingham by extolling his "scrupulous obedience" to such an infernal command. Johnson unwittingly proclaims the pardon of the slain woman in his anxiety to show that he signed her death-warrant through ignorance, forced upon him by the ineffable depravity of the men in whom he was compelled to trust.