The President—­“Third reading of the bill!”

The two friends shook in their shoes.  Senators threw down their extras and snatched a word or two with each other in whispers.  Then the gavel rapped to command silence while the names were called on the ayes and nays.  Washington grew paler and paler, weaker and weaker while the lagging list progressed; and when it was finished, his head fell helplessly forward on his arms.  The fight was fought, the long struggle was over, and he was a pauper.  Not a man had voted for the bill!

Col.  Sellers was bewildered and well nigh paralyzed, himself.  But no man could long consider his own troubles in the presence of such suffering as Washington’s.  He got him up and supported him—­almost carried him indeed—­out of the building and into a carriage.  All the way home Washington lay with his face against the Colonel’s shoulder and merely groaned and wept.  The Colonel tried as well as he could under the dreary circumstances to hearten him a little, but it was of no use.  Washington was past all hope of cheer, now.  He only said: 

“Oh, it is all over—­it is all over for good, Colonel.  We must beg our bread, now.  We never can get up again.  It was our last chance, and it is gone.  They will hang Laura!  My God they will hang her!  Nothing can save the poor girl now.  Oh, I wish with all my soul they would hang me instead!”

Arrived at home, Washington fell into a chair and buried his face in his hands and gave full way to his misery.  The Colonel did not know where to turn nor what to do.  The servant maid knocked at the door and passed in a telegram, saying it had come while they were gone.

The Colonel tore it open and read with the voice of a man-of-war’s broadside: 

“Verdict of jury, not guilty and Laura is free!”

CHAPTER LVIII.

The court room was packed on the morning on which the verdict of the jury was expected, as it had been every day of the trial, and by the same spectators, who had followed its progress with such intense interest.

There is a delicious moment of excitement which the frequenter of trials well knows, and which he would not miss for the world.  It is that instant when the foreman of the jury stands up to give the verdict, and before he has opened his fateful lips.

The court assembled and waited.  It was an obstinate jury.

It even had another question—­this intelligent jury—­to ask the judge this morning.

The question was this:  “Were the doctors clear that the deceased had no disease which might soon have carried him off, if he had not been shot?” There was evidently one jury man who didn’t want to waste life, and was willing to stake a general average, as the jury always does in a civil case, deciding not according to the evidence but reaching the verdict by some occult mental process.