Well, maybe that’s so.
Now, Amos, if you’ll go wherever you have to go to get a bucket of water, and will bring it here—”
“There’s a lavatory on the first floor, sir.”
“Do what you’re told,” the Inspector said sharply.
“And be quick about it.”
The Federal officers were examining their hands for blisters and swearing at the dust.
Amos went cheerfully up the cellar stairs, and came back in a moment with his pail.
He carried soap and a towel also, and his face was a study when the Inspector passed them back to him.
The next procedure, however, astounded the negro.
With one of the officers holding a light close to the surface of the ground, the Inspector went over it carefully.
He would pour a little water on the earth and watch it, then move on, repeating the performance.
Suddenly he muttered something and asked for the shovel.
Amos gave it to him, his eyes fixed on the earth, his color the peculiar gray of the terrified negro.
And there, not more than a foot beneath the surface, Inspector Harrison came across the sword-stick.
I can still see the rather smug complacence of his manner at the trial.
“I then sent Amos for a pail of water.”
“Perhaps you would better explain to the jury your purpose in sending for that water.”
“In case of buried objects the surface of the ground may not appear to have been disturbed.
In case however that it has been recently dug up, small bubbles of air will appear when water has been poured over it.”
“And were there such bubbles?”
“Plenty of them.”
So there they stood in that cellar, the four of them.
One of the Federal officers whistled softly.
Amos was staring at the thing, pop-eyed with terror.
It must have savored to him of witchcraft, that discovery; this detective, this policeman, muttering incantations to himself and then turning out that weapon into the cruel light.
“My Gawd Amighty!” said Amos, and turning, ran up the stairs.
They did not bother to follow him.
The Inspector carefully wrapped the thing in paper, and some one telephoned to the District Attorney’s office.
They had been holding poor Jim for the message.
But they held him after the message also.
Jim Blake was placed under arrest that night, and within three days he had been indicted by the Grand Jury for the murder of Sarah Gittings.
He was to be tried only for the murder of poor Sarah, but in the opinion of the public at that time Jim Blake was guilty of two, and in the minds of the police, of a third one.
Press comment was universally approving.
That the police would not have taken this drastic step “without good and sufficient reason”; that “murder is murder, whether committed by the gangster or by the individual in high place in the community”; that “the District Attorney’s office is to be congratulated in having at last taken steps to solve these crimes,” these were some of the comments.
Jim had been arrested after one o’clock Tuesday night, or rather early Wednesday morning, the eighteenth.
Sarah had been dead for precisely a month.
We were stunned with horror.
It came as less of a surprise to me than to the others, but it was a shock for all that.
We did little or nothing that first day.
Jim was in a cell in the jail and had sent for his lawyer, Godfrey Lowell.
Late in the day Godfrey came in to see me, and his face was very grave.
Jim’s cell was damp and the food terrible, but these things he passed by with a gesture.
“He’s not telling all he knows,” he said.
“He says he’s innocent, and I believe he is.
But he isn’t frank. He’s holding something back.”
Nevertheless, Jim’s story as Godfrey told it to us that afternoon in the library, was sufficiently damning.
Katherine hardly spoke during that recital.
Dick sat holding Judy’s hand, but I doubt if Katherine noticed it.
Briefly, Jim admitted having had an appointment to meet Sarah that night, but not in the park or by letter.
She had, he maintained, telephoned him.