Fourth. As the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Heathcote was unexpected, the crime must have been one of impulse: there had not been time for a plan.
Fifth. The motive was robbery: the murder was probably a second thought, occasioned, perhaps, by Helen's stirring.
Miss Lois did not waste time. Within a few days she was widely known in Timloesville—"the widow Young, from Washington, staying at Farmer Blackwell's, with her niece, who is out of health, poor thing, and her aunt so anxious about her." The widow was very affable, very talkative; she was considered an almost excitingly agreeable person. But it was strange that she should not have heard of their event, their own particular and now celebrated crime. Mrs. Strain, wife of J. Strain, Esq., felt that this ignorance was lamentable. She therefore proposed to the widow that she should in person go to the Timloe Hotel, and see with her own eyes "the very spot."
"The effect, Mrs. Young, is curdling," she declared.
Mrs. Young was willing to be curdled, if Mrs. Strain would support her in the experience. On the next afternoon, therefore, they went to the Timloe Hotel, and were shown over "the very floor" which had been pressed by the footsteps of the murderer, his beautiful wife, and her highly respectable and observing (one might almost say providentially observing) maid. The landlord himself, Mr. Graub, did not disdain to accompany them. Mr. Graub had attended the trial in person, and he had hardly ceased since to admire himself for his own perspicuous cleverness in owning the house where such a very distinguished crime had been committed. There might be localities where a like deed would have injured the patronage of an inn; but the neighborhood of Timloesville was not one of them. The people slowly took in and appreciated their event, as an anaconda is said slowly to take in and appreciate his dinner; they digested it at their leisure. Farmers coming in to town on Saturdays, instead of bringing luncheon in a tin pail, as usual, went to the expense of dining at the hotel, with their wives and daughters, in order to see the room, the blind, and the outside stairway. Mr. Graub, in this position of affairs, was willing to repeat the tale, even to a non-diner. For Mrs. Young was a stranger from Washington, and who knew but that Washington itself might be stirred to a dining interest in the scene of the tragedy, especially as the second trial was still to come?
The impression on the blind was displayed; it was very faint, but clearly that of a left hand.
"And here is the cloth that covered the bureau," continued the landlord, taking it from a paper and spreading it on the old-fashioned chest of drawers. "It is not the identical cloth, for that was required at the trial, together with a fac-simile of the blind; but I can assure you that this one is just like the original, blue-bordered and fringed precisely the same, and we traced the spots on it exactly similar before we let the other go. For we knew that folks would naturally be interested in such a memento."
"It is indeed deeply absorbing," said Mrs. Young. "I wonder, now, what the size of that hand might be? Not yours, Mr. Graub; yours is a very small hand. Let me compare. Suppose I place my fingers so (I will not touch it). Yes, a large hand, without doubt, and a left hand. Do you know of any left-handed persons about here?"
"Why, the man himself was left-handed," answered the landlord and Mrs. Strain together—"Captain Heathcote himself."
"He had been wounded, and carried his right arm in a sling," added Mr. Graub.