The Man of Last Resort by Melville Davisson Post

THERE was something on the Governor's mind, and when this condition obtained, interesting events had usually followed in the far Southwest. This highly mystic mental status had preceded the efforts of a Federal Court to compel him to act under a mandamus, and the result was history. It had preceded a memorable conflict between the legislature at large and His Excellency, the Governor, also at large, and immediately thereafter a certain statute had sprung into existence prohibiting the massing of State troops within one hundred miles of the Capitol during the sitting of the Solons of the Commonwealth; but it was a law after the fact. It had preceded also the mercurial efforts of the so-called patriotic orders to impeach the Executive for malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance, -- an effort that had brought to its instigators only a lurid and inglorious rout.

The Governor was standing at the eastern window of his private office looking out at the monotonous brown tablelands stretching away to the foothills of the blue mountains that marked the outer limits of his jurisdiction. He was a young man, this Governor, with the firm, straight figure of a soldier and the gracious bearing of important ancestry. His eyes were brown, and his hair and Van Dyke beard were brown also -- all indicative, say the sages, of precisely what the Governor was not. He was perfectly groomed. Every morning when he walked down to the State-house he was the marvel and the fastidious spotless idol of the far Southwest.