Page:The gold brick (1910).djvu/331

 replied the governor. He seemed to find a species of relief in this thought.

"Yes," Gilman said, "but the medical testimony was bad. It consisted of the conclusions of a young doctor who examined Brokoski's body after it had grown cold. He accepted Whalen's guilt as an established fact. He assumed that the bullet entered at the breast. There was then nothing to do but to trace its course through the tissues of the body. If his views were correct, the ball would have lodged somewhere behind Brokoski."

"But it flew out into the alley," argued the governor, "and shattered the window in doing so."

"True," assented Gilman, "and yet you assume all the while that Whalen fired the shot. Of course the circumstances attending the tragedy, the occasion, the quarrel, Whalen's flight, and the finding of his gun, lent strong color to that presumption."

"But the shattered window," the governor interpolated.

"Yes, and the shattered window. Now," he continued, "a surgeon, experienced in gunshot wounds, might have been able to distinguish in such a wound as Brokoski's, the point of the missile's entrance