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“Not now–but I’d like to talk to you again about some things when we’re both rested up.”

“Have it your own way. I can’t get away from you for a while–not with this hole drilled in me shoulder.”

However, Ginsburg did not have it his own way. The wound in his leg gave threat of trouble and at once he was shifted south to one of the big base hospitals. An operation followed and after that a rather long, slow convalescence.

In the same week of November that the armistice was signed, Ginsburg, limping slightly, went aboard a troopship bound for home. It befell, therefore, that he spent the winter on sick leave in New York. He had plenty of spare time on his hands and some of it he employed in business of a more or less private nature. For example, he called on the district attorney and a few days later went to Albany and called upon the governor. A returned soldier whose name has been often in the paper and who wears on his uniform tunic two bits of ribbon and on his sleeves service and wound stripes is not kept waiting in anterooms these times. He saw the governor just as he had seen the district attorney–promptly. In fact, the governor felt it to be an honour to meet a soldier who had been decorated for gallantry in action and so expressed himself. Later he called in the reporters and restated the fact; but when one of the reporters inquired into the reasons for Sergeant Ginsburg’s visit at this time the governor shook his head.

“The business between us was confidential,” he said smilingly. “But I might add that Sergeant Ginsburg got what he came for. And it wasn’t a job either. I’m afraid, though, that you young gentlemen will have to wait a while for the rest of the details. They’ll come out in time no doubt. But just for the present a sort of surprise is being planned for someone and while I’m to be a party to it I don’t feel at liberty to tell about it–yet.”

* * * * *

Now it is a part of the business of newspaper men to put two and two together and get four. Months later, recalling what the governor had said to the Albany correspondents, divers city editors with the aid of their bright young staff men did put two and two together and they got a story. It was a peach of a bird of a gem of a story that they got on the day a transport nosed up the harbour bearing what was left of one of the infantry regiments of the praiseworthy Metropolitan Division.

Even in those days of regardless receptions for home-arriving troops it did not often happen that a secretary to the governor and an assistant from the office of the district attorney went down the bay on the same tug to meet the same returning soldier–and he a private soldier at that. Each of these gentlemen had put on his long-tailed coat and his two-quart hat for the gladsome occasion; each of them carried a document for personal presentation to this private soldier.

And the sum total of these documents was: Firstly, to the full legal effect that a certain indictment of long standing was now by due processes of law forever and eternally quashed; and secondly, that the governor had seen fit to remove all disabilities against a certain individual, thereby restoring the person named to all the rights, boons, benefits and privileges of citizenship; and thirdly, that in accordance with a prior and privy design, now fully carried out, the recipient of these documents had official guaranty, stamped, sealed and delivered, that when he set foot on the soil of these United States he would do so without cloud upon his title as a sovereign voter, without blemish on his name and without fear of prosecution in his heart. And the upshot of it all was that the story was more than a peach; it was a pippin. The rehabilitation of Private Pasquale Gallino, sometime known as Stretchy Gorman, gangster, and more latterly still as P. Goodman, U. S. A., A. E. F., was celebrated to the extent of I don’t know how many gallons of printer’s ink.