wn them. For the last time I put the pleading protest under foot.
Freedom, a fortune, and Polly's happiness: the triple bribe was too great
and I uncapped the pen.

It was at this precise moment that footsteps in the corridor warned me
that someone was coming. A bit of the old convict secretiveness made me
hastily thrust the papers out of sight under the cot blankets, and at the
rattling of the key in the lock I stood up to confront--Whitredge.

"You?" I said. "I thought you were going to give me until to-morrow
morning."

He looked strangely perturbed, and the nervousness was also in his voice
when he said: "I meant to, Bert, but I've had a wire, and I've got to go
back to Glendale on this next train"--dragging his watch out of its
pocket and glancing at it hurriedly. "Those papers: you've had time
enough to think things over, and I'm sure you've made up your mind to do
the sensible thing. Let me have them so I can set things in motion
before I leave town."

I wondered why he kept jerking his head around to look over his shoulder
as he talked, and why the turnkey jingled his keys and waited. But the
time for indecision on my part was past and I reached under the blanket
for the two papers. With the three-legged stool for a writing-table I
was kneeling to put my name at the bottom of the letter to my partners
when there were more footsteps in the corridor, hurried ones, this time,
and I looked up to see the squarely built, competent figure of our
Western lawyer, Benedict, standing in the cell doorway, with the deputy
warden, Cummings, backgrounding him.

"Hello, Whitredge; at your old tricks, are you?" snapped the new-comer
brusquely. And then to me: "What are you signing there, Bertrand?"

"Nothing, now--without your advice," I said, getting up and handing him
the letter.

Whitredge couldn't get out, with Benedict filling the doorway, so he had
to stand a cringing second prisoner, looking this way and that, like a
rat searching for a hole, while the big Westerner read calmly through the
letter which had been written out for me. That moment amply repaid me
for much that I had suffered at the hands of Cyrus Whitredge.

"Humph!" said Benedict, folding the letter and thrusting it into his
pocket. "Now what's that other document?"

I gave him the petition for pardon, and again he took his time with the
reading.

"Nice little scheme you were trying to pull off!" he said to Whitredge,
after the petition,