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 murder anybody--he hadn't character enough; secondly, if he could murder a person he wouldn't select his doting benefactor and nearest relative; thirdly, self-interest was in the way; for while the uncle lived, Tom was sure of a free support and a chance to get the destroyed will revived again, but with the uncle gone, that chance was gone too. It was true the will had really been revived, as was now discovered, but Tom could not have been aware of it, or he would have spoken of it, in his native talky, unsecretive way. Finally, Tom was in St. Louis when the murder was done, and got the news out of the morning journals, as was shown by his telegram to his aunt. These speculations were umemphasized sensations rather than articulated thoughts, for Wilson would have laughed at the idea of seriously connecting Tom with the murder.
Wilson regarded the case of the twins as desperate--in fact, about hopeless. For he argued that if a confederate was not found, an enlightened Missouri jury would hang them; sure; if a confederate was found, that would not improve the matter, but simply furnish one more person for the sheriff to hang.
Nothing could save the twins but the discovery of a person who did the murder on his sole personal account--an undertaking which had all the aspect of the impossible. Still, the person who made the fingerprints must be sought. The twins might have no case WITH them, but they certainly would have none without him.
So Wilson mooned around, thinking, thinking, guessing, guessing, day and night, and arriving nowhere. Whenever he ran across a girl or a woman he was not acquainted with, he got her fingerprints, on one pretext or another; and they always cost him a sigh when he got home, for they never tallied with the finger marks on the knife handle.
As to the mysterious girl, Tom swore he knew no such girl, and did not remember ever seeing a girl wearing a dress like the one described by Wilson. He admitted that he did not always lock his room, and that sometimes the servants forgot to lock the house doors; still, in his opinion the girl must have made but few visits or she would have been discovered. When Wilson tried to connect her with the stealing raid, and thought she might have been the old woman' confederate, if not the very thief disguised as an old woman, Tom seemed stuck, and also much interested, and said he would keep a sharp eye out for this person or persons, although he was afraid that she or they would be too smart to venture again into a town where everybody would now be on the watch for a good while to come.
Everybody was pitying Tom, he looked so quiet and sorrowful, and seemed to feel his great loss so deeply. He was playing a part, but it was not all a part. The picture of his alleged uncle, as he had last seen him, was before him in the dark pretty frequently, when he was away, and called again in his dreams, when he was asleep. He wouldn't go into the room where the tragedy had happened. This charmed the doting Mrs. Pratt, who realized now, "as she had never done before," she said, what a sensitive and delicate nature her darling had, and how he adored his poor uncle.
