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After Beecher considered everything King had to say, he was satisfied that the scandal had been overblown, the result of the “foolish peccadilloes of a young man committed fourteen or fifteen years ago” and should not weigh on Cleveland’s current life or candidacy. He added that he was embarrassed to have been “wrongfully made to mistrust Governor Cleveland” and would now do anything to show his “appreciation” of the man.

“I am going to stand by the governor,” Beecher informed King.

An ecstatic King returned to Brooklyn and promptly got the word out that Beecher had returned to the Cleveland column. When a reporter for the New York Tribune went to Boscobel to check out the reports of this remarkable conversion, he found Beecher’s wife, Eunice, in the library. Beecher, she said, was currently unavailable. He was resting in another room.

“My husband has been quite ill for several days, and I don’t think it best to disturb him.” Mrs. Beecher said she had been up for forty-eight hours nursing him. Doctors said it was an attack of colic, but Mrs. Beecher suspected something else.

“The truth of the matter is, worry and anxiety about this Cleveland scandal have been the main difficulty with Mr. Beecher. It came upon him like a flash of lightning. He had always regarded Mr. Cleveland as a clean man. He was completely prostrated when he heard reports to the contrary.”

There was a commotion. The great Henry Ward Beecher was awake. Mrs. Beecher jumped from her chair.

“Henry, it is another reporter.”

The man from the Tribune apologized for the intrusion and showed Beecher clippings from recent newspaper articles asserting that he was now, with a “clear conscience” backing Cleveland for the presidency—“unless something more damaging than has yet been published is produced.” Beecher impatiently tossed the articles aside.

“I know perfectly well what they contain, and in a measure they tell the truth. I wrote a hurried and private letter to an old friend, Mr. Peck, in which I said substantially that if the charges against Mr. Cleveland were proved, I should not support him. If he is such a man as this, I am done. This letter was entirely private, and I am pained that extracts from it should have found their way into print. I have now suspended judgment and am awaiting more light. You know that sometimes one gropes in the dark for a time, but the exercise of a little patience will generally show the way.”

Meanwhile, Horatio King arranged for his own interview with the New York World. He declared that he had gone to Buffalo determined to get to the bottom of the case. The story that ran the next day was nothing short of a full-blown attack on Maria Halpin. King had taken his cue from Charley McCune’s tall tale and run with it. Here was King’s account:

The facts seem to be that many years ago when the governor was “sowing his wild oats,” he met this woman, with whom his name has been connected, and became intimate with her. She was a widow and not a good woman by any means. Mr. Cleveland, hearing this, began to make inquiries about her and discovered that two of his friends were intimate with her at the same time as himself.

When a child was born, Cleveland, in order to shield his two friends, who were both married men, assumed the responsibility of it. He took care of the child and mother like a man, and did everything in his power for them, and he provided for them until the woman became a confirmed victim of alcoholism and made it impossible by her conduct for him to have anything to do with her. He never separated the mother and child, nor did he do anything to injure the woman. He was throughout the affair a victim of circumstances. He accepted responsibilities that not one man in a thousand has shouldered and acted honorably in the matter.

After the child was born the woman made a habit of visiting every man with whom she had been intimate and demanded money under a threat of exposure. Three of her four admirers—for she was an attractive woman—were married and the man who