Page:The gold brick (1910).djvu/213

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The assistant state treasurer drew a jingling bunch of keys from his pocket and locked the door. Grigsby's eyes were fastened on the paper at the governor's feet. His heart was swelling in his throat. His fingers were twitching, and he was sweating like a stoker. At Mendenhall's approach the governor placed his foot upon the paper. When Mendenhall had done, the governor picked it up. He smoothed it out in his fingers, and slowly adjusted his glasses. By the dim light that always burns at night just outside the door of the state treasury he read it. Then he placed it in the pocket of his overcoat. He kept his hand upon it. The blue of Grigsby's face deepened.

The three men went down the stairs, the governor standing aside at the top to let them precede him. They crossed the rotunda, past the slumbering janitor whose snores ascended and exploded in the rounded blackness of the hollow dome, down the east corridor and so out into the darkness. They walked together down the wide stone walk, the stone walk as wide as a street, that sweeps, with a strip of sward down its middle, across the state house lawns to Capitol Avenue. The governor did not turn up