CORONER AND JURY.
The post-mortem examination had been held; and three doctors had sworn that deceased came to his death from a great variety of Greek and Latin troubles, all caused by a learned something which signified, in plain English, a blow on the head. Coroner Bullfast was so struck with the clear and explicit nature of the medical evidence, that he had it reduced to writing for his private regalement.
The post-mortem examination, and the testimony of the three doctors, and of all the people in the house (except Patty Minford, daughter of the deceased)--whose joint knowledge upon the subject amounted to nothing more than hearing somebody with heavy boots come down stairs about midnight--occupied the whole of the first day. Patty, or Pet, was so thoroughly unnerved by the events of that horrible night, that the coroner found it impossible to take her evidence on that day. She had fainted twice before she could make Coroner Bullfast clearly understand that Marcus Wilkeson, her benefactor, and her father's best friend, was THE MURDERER. Having learned thus much, the coroner had put the police on the track of Marcus Wilkeson, and had postponed the further examination of the chief witness.
Mrs. Crull, on learning of the tragic affair, had gone in person to the house of death, and taken Patty to her own home.
The remains of the unfortunate inventor had been removed to the nearest undertaker's for interment, at the expense of Mrs. Crull. The apartments had been diligently searched, and the personal effects of the deceased examined, under the direction of the coroner. A number of documents had been discovered, which, in the coroner's opinion, threw a flood of light on the motives that led to the crime. A few dollars and a bull's-eye silver watch, found on the dead body, precluded the idea that the murder was done for plunder. With that quickness of perception for which Coroner Bullfast, like most of his official kind, was celebrated, he had formed his theory of the murder, and tremendously strong must be the future testimony that could shake it.
On the morning of the second day, Coroner Bullfast and the jury reassembled, about ten o'clock, in the room where the murder was committed.
The coroner was a jovial man, with a bulging forehead, a ruddy nose, a large diamond breastpin (a real diamond, of that superlative style only seen in its perfection on the shirt fronts of aldermen, contractors, and Washington Market butchers), and the native New York manner of speaking, which is sharp and mandatory. The coroner began life as a stone mason, gained early distinction as a fireman, controlled several hundred votes in his ward, became a member of a political committee, and got a coronership as his share of the spoils. He had aspired to be a police justice, or city inspector, or commissioner of the Croton Board. To either of these positions, or, for that matter, to any position indefinitely higher, he felt himself perfectly equal. But other members of the committee (which was a kind of joint-stock company for the distribution of offices) had prior and stronger claims than Harry Bullfast, and so he was put off with a coronership. He felt the slight acutely, but, like a prudent man, determined to so keep himself before the public in his performance of the office, as to make it a stepping stone to something much higher--the city comptrollership, or a seat in the State Senate, or in Congress, or (who could tell?) the governorship of the commonwealth--that grand possibility which every ward politician carries in his hat.
The coroner was seated in the inventor's private armchair, with one leg thrown over the side of it, and the other stretched on the floor. He was chewing tobacco with manly vigor, and cracking jokes with a facetious juryman, who was assistant foreman of the Bully Boy Hose, of which the coroner was an exempt and honorary member.
The jury was composed of six men whom the coroner had picked from the large number of idle spectators found by him at the scene of the murder when he was first summoned. Two of them chanced to be acquaintances of his. As to the rest, the coroner had not the remotest idea. They might have been beggars or pickpockets, for aught that he cared. They looked stupid, and he liked stupid jurors.
"Them sharp fellers that thinks they knows more'n the cor'ner, is a cussed nuisance," he often had occasion to remark.
The jury sat near one of the windows, in a semicircle of chairs which had been borrowed from the first and second floors. Pending the resumption of their melancholy work, such of them as could read were reading newspapers containing reports of the first day's proceedings, from two to ten columns long, wherein the scene of the "Mysterious Midnight Tragedy," as one paper called it, was represented in the most ingenious manner by printers' rules cut to show the dimensions of the rooms on the third floor, the position of the fireplace, bed, washstand, chest of drawers, unknown machine in the corner, and other things which had no bearing whatever on the affair. The other jurors, who could not read at all, or had an insuperable aversion to that laborious occupation, were rolling their quids in silence, and looking wise.
At a long table in the centre of the room were seated several young gentlemen, dressed with singular independence of style. From one point of view they looked like actors, bearing about them signs of fatigue, as if from heavy night work. Observed again, they resembled young lawyers of indolent habits and scanty practice, who had just dropped in to watch the case.
From their conversation, no clue to their professional identity could be gathered. They were cracking jokes, propounding conundrums, and telling stories humorously broad to each other. Everything was to them a legitimate amusement. The proceedings of the day before were peculiarly rich in funny reminiscences; and one tall, bright, curly-haired fellow was evoking roars of suppressed laughter by his capital mimicry of two of the dullest witnesses. Another was drawing comic profiles of a sleepy juryman on a scrap of paper. He had previously dashed off a very happy sketch of the coroner, and shown it to that functionary, who had "haw-hawed," and pronounced it "devilish good," and, in turn, presented the young artist with a fine Havana cigar, which he playfully put in his mouth and chewed the end of. Yet there were, about these young gentlemen, signs of business, which an intelligent observer might have easily interpreted. From the outside breast pockets of each of them protruded a number of pencils; and, from their lower side pockets, thick memorandum books with gray covers, or stiffly folded quires of foolscap.
They were the reporters of the press--the gamins and good fellows of literature;--fellows of inexhaustible resources, who carry their wits literally at their fingers' ends;--who can do more than extract sunbeams from cucumbers; for they can make up thrilling facts out of nothing;--who can thread their way through a crowd where a tapeworm would be squeezed to death;--whose writing desk is usually another man's back; and who sketch out a much better speech between an orator's shoulder blades than he is making in front;--whose written language is a perplexity compared with which Greek is a relaxation and Sanscrit a positive amusement;--who deal in adjectives, and know their precise value, and how to administer them, as an apothecary knows the drugs that are boxed and bottled on his shelves;--who are less men than parts of an enormous mill grinding out grist to be branned and bolted in the editorial rooms, made into food in the printing office and press vault, and served up hot for the public's breakfast next morning.
Clever, witty, insatiable fellows they, for whom a planet ought to be set apart, where all the murders are wrapped in impenetrable mystery, and the smallest railroad accidents are frightful catastrophes.
The east side of the room, where the dead body had been found, was preserved inviolate from the broom, mop, and other touch, until the inquest was over. The strange machine stood in its accustomed place, flanked by the screen. It had been extensively handled and looked at, and passed for a new kind of clock. Two large weights (which had fallen to the floor) and the interplaying cogwheels gave force to that conjecture.
A large purple spot on the floor showed where the old man's life had ebbed away. Close by this spot, precisely where it had been picked up, lay the long oaken club with the iron tip, which, it was supposed, had done the dreadful deed. There were small splashes and spots on it too.
The fun of the reporters, the chat of the coroner and his friends, the readings and airy meditations of the jurors, were all suddenly checked by the appearance of Marcus Wilkeson, escorted by two police officers, and Messrs. Overtop and Maltboy, Patching and Tiffles. All five had passed the night in the station house--Messrs. Patching and Tiffles from compulsion, as witnesses, and possible accomplices, and Overtop and Maltboy as guides, philosophers, and friends. All looked seedy and criminal, as if there were something in the atmosphere of station houses to give a man the semblance of a vagabond and an outcast. Marcus Wilkeson was very pale, and, when he looked across the room, as he did upon his entrance, by a singular impulse, and saw the great blood mark and the club on the floor, he trembled with emotion.
The keen eyes of the coroner caught these signs, and he immediately brought in a mental verdict of "guilty." Some of the jury observed the same signs, and thought them suspicious. The reporters looked upon Marcus Wilkeson without emotion or prejudgment. They were so accustomed to seeing murderers, that they regarded them simply as a part of the business community--a little vicious, perhaps, but not so much worse than other people, after all. One reporter, attached to an illustrated paper, dashed off the profile of Marcus Wilkeson, under the cover of his hat, and caught the dejected expression of his face to a nicety.