“Mr. Beggs, I hope you can endure this brief and belated ceremony, well overdue and well deserved by you.” The President unfolded the sheet of paper. “Permit me to read the citation. ‘To Mr. Otto Beggs, veteran agent of the White House Secret Service Detail: At the recommendation of the President of the United States, and the Secretary of the Treasury, I hereby bestow upon you the highest award the government can give to a civilian, the Exceptional Civilian Service Honor, which is reserved for those who demonstrate outstanding courage and voluntarily risk personal safety, in the face of danger, while performing assigned duties, and whose performance results in direct benefit to other employees of the Department and to the government. Otto Beggs, for outstanding bravery in shielding the person of the President while under fire from an assassin’s gun, I do here and now cite you for your action and present you with this gold medal, gold lapel button, and certificate testifying that your country has bestowed this honor upon you.’ ”

Tears welled in Beggs’s eyes, and he was too choked to reply. He had the gold medal, and then the President’s hand, and he tried to smile at the applause, and at the photographers who swarmed into the room to shoot pictures of the bedside ceremony.

After posing with the President, and then with Gertrude and the boys, and then with the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chief, Beggs fell back against his pillows exhausted. The President held up his hand.

“Mr. Beggs,” he said, “you are now a unique American hero, the sole citizen in our land who is the possessor of both the nation’s highest military award and its highest civilian award. One might imagine there is no place higher for you to go. However, it is our belief that there is much more you deserve, and can attain, in your chosen career. The Secret Service is waiting for your return to active duty, Mr. Beggs, although not at the same old stand. I am pleased to announce your promotion, effective as of today, to the position of Chief of the White House Detail. Our good friend, Lou Agajanian, is moving on to New York, and you, Mr. Beggs, will have his responsibility, his desk. We need you. Get back to us as soon as you can!”

Beggs, tears trickling down his cheeks, whispered, “I’ll be there, you bet. Thank you, Mr. President.”

The room was emptying now, and Gertrude herded the boys against the wall and held back, as the President went to join Flannery, who was waiting for him.

It was then, as Dilman and Flannery were about to leave, that Beggs remembered something he had meant to tell the President.

“Mr. President,” he called out. “May I speak to you for a moment, sir?”

“Why, yes, of course-”

Dilman nodded for Flannery to go outside, and then he came back to the bed and stood beside Beggs.

“Mr. President, I just have to tell you one incident I wasn’t going to tell anyone,” Beggs said in an undertone. “Zeke Miller himself, and some fellow named Wine, they were here last night. They sort of sneaked in. They tried to get me embittered about being crippled, tried to work me up against you-but what they were really after was a signed affidavit from me for the trial-a statement confessing that I saw you with Miss Wanda Gibson, behaving like they pretended you behaved-and claiming that I saw you drinking from time to time-and that I saw you, overheard you, at Trafford University talking to your son about the Turnerites. Know what I told them?”

President Dilman waited, silently.

Beggs said, “I told them to get the hell out of here before I knocked their crooked heads together and dropped them both out the window.” Solemnly, he stared at the leg suspended in traction. “You see, Mr. President, men like that don’t understand the first thing about the Secret Service. If they did, they’d have known my responsibility is to protect the President of the United States from every harm including assassination, even if it’s character assassination. I guess they didn’t know I was still on duty-and always will be. That’s all I wanted to assure you of, Mr. President.”

It was the President’s turn, Beggs could see, to be emotionally moved, much as Dilman was trying to hide it.

“Thank you, Mr. Beggs.”

“Nothing to thank me for. Like I said-I was doing my job.”

The moment the President was gone, Beggs wanted to be alone, but there were Gertrude and Otis and Ogden rushing toward him. Gertrude was over him, smothering him with her thin kisses, sniffling and wheezing, while the boys fought to clasp his free hand in panting joy. All Beggs could find to say to Gertrude, keep mumbling to her, was that now, with his promotion, there would be a sizable raise in salary, and now she could start hunting seriously for a different house, something in the suburbs where the Schearers lived, a house in a neighborhood that would make her happier. And she kept saying that it wasn’t a snob neighborhood that she would look for, only a larger place, a ranch-style house with sun, something roomier, that offered better surroundings for the boys. And he kept saying, wearily, that the task was in her department, and he was sure she would find something, and maybe it wouldn’t hurt if she left some time for herself to shop for a new dress or two, maybe that wouldn’t hurt.

When the nurse pried them apart, and led Gertrude and the children out of the hospital room, Otto Beggs was thankful to be by himself at last. There was a good deal to think about, the gold medal in his hand, its luster dimmed and its size diminished only by his bandaged hulking leg in traction. There was that, and the new executive job with its higher salary, and the new house in a classier neighborhood, and the family with their new respect and new clothes, and yet his mind touched each of these wonders briefly, then impatiently left it behind.

He turned his eyes toward the modest violet plant standing on the medicine table beside him.

Upon this, his thoughts lingered at length.

Otter.

He wondered what it would have been like, when he was still a man of action…

“I WONDER,” said Leroy Poole, “what’s keeping the President. It’s twenty minutes already. I’m sick of looking at that stupid fish.”

Poole grimaced at the fish mounted on the board above the fireplace of the White House reception room, then glanced at Mrs. Gladys Hurley.

Gladys Hurley, seated straight, her shoulders back, mouth pinched, continued to look at the carpet and said nothing.

Fretfully, Poole wandered to the desk, picked at the museum-piece typewriter that was supposed to have been used by President Woodrow Wilson (another overrated fink, half his Cabinet members Southerners, ordering Negro Federal employees in Washington to be segregated, so busy trying to make the world safe for democracy he’d let sixty-nine lynchings take place in one year of his administration). Then irritably, Poole returned to the center table, yanked up a chair, and squatted in it, drumming his pudgy fingers on the tabletop.

He tried to keep his mind from imagining how Jeff Hurley felt this late afternoon, in his debasing prison garb, in his chilly deathrow cell in the State Penitentiary. It made Poole tremble to think what Jeff Hurley himself might be thinking this minute: in six days from this day, this hour, he would be strapped into the big lethal chair, held helpless while the cyanide capsules dropped, and he would be gassed until dead because of kidnaping for ransom and murder. He would be dying for a crime that was not his own but America’s crime, an innocent saint rubbed off the earth because the guilty who remained did not want to hear his accusations. This minute this good giant, this Gulliver pinioned by pygmies, was helpless, voiceless, impotent. Noble Jeff, great Jeff, poor Jeff, lost to life and the future, unless the two of them in this reception room, his protesters by proxy, could save him.