Roxana to herself; then he telegraphed his Aunt Pratt:
Have seen the awful news in the papers and am almost
prostrated with grief. Shall start by packet today.
Try to bear up till I come.
When Wilson reached the house of mourning and had gathered
such details as Mrs. Pratt and the rest of the crowd could tell him,
he took command as mayor, and gave orders that nothing
should be touched, but everything left as it was until Justice
Robinson should arrive and take the proper measures as corner.
He cleared everybody out of the room but the twins and himself.
The sheriff soon arrived and took the twins away to jail.
Wilson told them to keep heart, and promised to do it best in their
defense when the case should come to trial. Justice Robinson
came presently, and with him Constable Blake. They examined the
room thoroughly. They found the knife and the sheath.
Wilson noticed that there were fingerprints on the knife’s handle.
That pleased him, for the twins had required the earliest comers to
make a scrutiny of their hands and clothes, and neither these
people nor Wilson himself had found any bloodstains upon them.
Could there be a possibility that the twins had spoken the truth
when they had said they found the man dead when they ran into the
house in answer to the cry for help? He thought of that
mysterious girl at once. But this was not the sort of work for a
girl to be engaged in. No matter; Tom Driscoll’s room must be examined.
After the coroner’s jury had viewed the body and its surroundings,
Wilson suggested a search upstairs, and he went along.
The jury forced an entrance to Tom’s room, but found nothing, of course.
The coroner’s jury found that the homicide was committed by Luigi,
and that Angelo was accessory to it.
The town was bitter against he misfortunates, and for the
first few days after the murder they were in constant danger of
being lynched. The grand jury presently indicted Luigi for
murder in the first degree, and Angelo as accessory before the fact.
The twins were transferred from the city jail to the
county prison to await trial.
Wilson examined the finger marks on the knife handle and
said to himself, “Neither of the twins made those marks.”
Then manifestly there was another person concerned, either in his
own interest or as hired assassin.”
But who could it be? That, he must try to find out.
The safe was not opened, the cashbox was closed, and had three
thousand dollars in it. Then robbery was not the motive,
and revenge was. Where had the murdered man an enemy except Luigi?
There was but that one person in the world with a deep grudge against him.
The mysterious girl! The girl was a great trial to Wilson.
If the motive had been robbery, the girl might answer; but there
wasn’t any girl that would want to take this old man’s life for revenge.
He had no quarrels with girls; he was a gentleman.
Wilson had perfect tracings of the finger marks of the knife handle;
and among his glass records he had a great array of
fingerprints of women and girls, collected during the last
fifteen or eighteen years, but he scanned them in vain,
they successfully withstood every test; among them were no duplicates
of the prints on the knife.
The presence of the knife on the stage of the murder was a
worrying circumstance for Wilson. A week previously he had as
good as admitted to himself that he believed Luigi had possessed
such a knife, and that he still possessed it notwithstanding his
pretense that it had been stolen. And now here was the knife,
and with it the twins. Half the town had said the twins were
humbugging when the claimed they had lost their knife,
and now these people were joyful, and said, “I told you so!”
If their fingerprints had been on the handle–but useless to
bother any further about that; the fingerprints on the handle
were NOT theirs–that he knew perfectly.
Wilson refused to suspect Tom; for first, Tom couldn’t