The hand dropped to his side as of no further consequence it had served its purpose as a barometer of the condition and he stared into the filigreed wall opposite, where the evanescent afternoon shadows were making figured tapestry with the reflected light from the tawny-amber dome above and sat there blankly conscious, introspective with deep preoccupation. There were tears in many eyes. Respect withheld what might have been a curious crowd. The minutes slowly dragged their sullen feet away and out on the floor there was still some belated scuffling with the prisoner. The President noted it and was drawn by its disturbing clatter from the repose of isolation to which he had been brought.

"Be easy with him, boys," he said, and then relapsed again for just the briefest space, the intervals all being hardly noticeable in point of time, then revived and whispered the name of his secretary. Mr. Cortelyou bent over him and heard, spoken slowly :

"My wife don't let her know of this and if she does don't let it be exaggerated." At that moment Mr. Buchanan, the director-general of the exposition, was admitted to the Temple. He found his way to within a few steps of the President, who recognized him and who had by that time taken wakeful observation of the happenings about him. He looked in Mr. Buchanan's direction and as the other approached nearer said:

"I am sorry that this should have happened at the exposition."

Those three thoughts were uppermost in his mind: desire for fair play with the assassin, anxiety for his wife, and regret for the hurt the exposition might receive. The arrival of the ambulance was six minutes after the shooting and throughout the ride to the hospital the President sat up. . . . Later the President was removed to the Milburn home. For the next six days hope mounted high. Everyone except the chronic grumblers thought the President would recover. Senator Hanna, his life-long, steadfast friend, saw a rainbow in the sky and declared he believed in "the McKinley star," and Vice-President Roosevelt, who had hurried on a special train to the bedside of the President, was so secure in his belief that he left for the Adirondacks, put civilization behind him and when he was next wanted was forty-two miles from a telegraph wire. The newspapers and the country looked for slow recovery and were counting the period of expected convalescence. The Buffalo papers were rather gleefully commenting on the probability of the city becoming what Secretary Root declared it might become, "the summer capital." Even the doctors were deceived. There were several indications, however, that the President was not yet past the danger point; the feeding of food by injection became impossible because of threatened inflammation and on Thursday morning it was decided to give him a light breakfast. He had toast, coffee, chicken broth, beef juice and finished with rare relish by asking for a cigar. That day, considering everything, was a remarkably bright one. The weather was perfect and the President, said all, was on the road to recovery.

Thursday night brought the first serious sign of danger. The physicians were obliged to give their patient violent purgatives and at 2:30 o'clock of Friday morning the collapse came. His life for the next twenty-four hours was an artificial one. That Friday fell on the 13th doubly an unlucky day. The city woke to get the fateful news that the President's pulse had almost ceased its throb and from then on the telltale mincings of the official bulletins brought merely varied versions of a "hope against hope."

There was a time through the morning when to hope seemed reasonable. The pulse and temperature had gone back to their normal condition of the day before, but when Secretary Cortelyou, on his regular afternoon visit to the newspaper tent across the street, said with words which had been well weighed: "If the President lives until morning there will be grounds for hope," the immediate analysis brought the conviction that there really was no ground for hope. Throughout the city, from then on, the fact of grave danger was so potent that the air was charged with the momentous import of the situation.

In the sick room the day had been one of battle a battle against death ; and outside, to the world which did not know the details of that fierce fight, there was just as hard a struggle against the deadening fear of the worst. No one wished to admit the grievous fact, but the conclusion was irresistible. Each person who came from the Milburn house physicians, Cabinet ministers, Senators, Governors and members of the family brought through the afternoon the word: "He is in peril," and as the careless radiance of the buoyant exposition beyond lit its way into the starry sky all that could be said by anybody was: "He is still alive."

On that last gray and awful night as the great heart beat slower, each feeble minute keeping sure count for the last lingering run of the life-sands, the tension among the watchers grew. It became a tremendous pressure. The creak of a sentry's boot on the pavement in front of the Milburn house, where armed guards paced with clock-like regularity, brought quick response from the newspaper men across the street. There were more than 100 of them. It was no idle crowd, such as gathered down town swearing feeble vengeance against the triumphant murderer. Each was a picked man, chosen for experience and skill. The chief papers of Christendom and many of the minor ones were represented there. This immense tongue, which was to tell the fateful news to 80,000,000 of William McKinley's fellow citizens and to other millions waiting wherever the telegraph tolls its disturbing click, was hushed in awful preparation for its direful loosening. At the word, that avalanche of news was to be poured onto the world a thunderbolt from the night.

The moments dragged, each one heavy with expectancy and each one supposed to be the last. Mrs. McKinley was induced to take rest and the entire number of those who waited were in the condition of a condemned man waiting for the rope to drop. A heart specialist from Washington arrived at midnight, at record-breaking pace, in an electric automobile, but it was too late. . . . The end came quietly, like the ebbing of the tide, at that indistinct time of the early morning when lives most frequently go out.

The President had been unconscious for seven hours; he died at 2:15. In the evening, before lapsing into mere breathing life, there occurred that spiritual uplift which was to place the final, lasting purport of a sacred benediction on his life's best effort. As his soul reeled on the brink for that concluding conscious moment before its dissolution, there came to him a flitting period of time wherein the memory of his long life of deeds and thoughts, his wife, his children and his friends, passed before him like the phantasmia of a dream, and with that vision in his already death-glazed eyes he murmured slowly:

"Good bye all, good bye! It is God's-way. His will, not ours, be done."

The rest was silence. With that resignation in his heart he found eternity. It was a simple, manly death a death worthy the President of the United States.