Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/100



The incident, like that on which the story itself was founded, occurred in the course of another effort to induce the Governor to save a poor wretch from the gallows. The autumn preceding, just when the World's Fair at Chicago was at its apogee, a half-crazed boy had assassinated Carter Harrison, the old mayor of that city, and had been promptly tried and condemned to death. The time for the execution of the sentence drew on, and two or three days before the black event I had a telegram from Peter Dunne and other newspaper friends in Chicago asking me to urge the governor, or the acting governor as it happened at that time to be, to commute the sentence to one of imprisonment for life. The boy, so the telegrams said, was clearly insane, and had been at the time of his crazy and desperate deed; his case had not been presented with the skill that might have saved him, or at least might have saved another in such a plight; there had been the customary hue and cry, the most cherished process of the English law, "and," Dunne concluded, "do get Joe Gill to let him off."

Joe Gill was Joseph B. Gill, the young Lieutenant-Governor of the state, and because Governor Altgeld was just then out of the state he was on the bridge as acting governor. Gill had been one of the Immortal 101, and as a representative had made a record in support of certain humane measures in behalf of the miners of the state. The newspaper