Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/348

 After a careful reading of the testimony, I wrote an opinion refusing the pardon and saying:

I entertained not the slightest doubt that it was a brutal murder for money. Some months afterward I made an inspection of the Eastern Penitentiary and, when it had been completed, the warden took me to some of the cells to see the inmates. He unlocked a door and disclosed two cells, an outer and an inner, the latter reached through a door so low that a man entering would have to stoop. On invitation I stepped inside, leaving the warden in the corridor. Inside, a man perhaps fifty years of age, with light hair, blue eyes and sandy complexion smilingly greeted me and asked me to look at the shop where he did his work as a shoemaker. I stooped and entered the inner compartment and he followed and stood at the door. The sharpened shoemaker's knife with which he cut the leather lay on the table within his easy reach. Then his smile ceased, he looked me in the face and said:

“I am Cutaiar.”

He was the murderer whose pardon I had refused. On the instant there flashed across my mind that dramatic scene in Victor Hugo's novel Quatre—vingt—treize, where 332