“The Sheriff had had a horse taken a few nights before when they searched my cottage, and when his dogs had begun to bark and give the alarm, he said to the court, he had fired the contents of his shotgun at a man who was galloping away from his barn. He told the court that the man he had fired at was me. In the morning the horse was found in the Sheriff’s field, with blood on its side and mane. The prosecuting attorney brought out at the trial that the horse was used to convey the body of the murdered girl to the place which I had secured as a grave for her.
“No motive was ever given for my having killed her. If I had ruined her, there would even then have been no motive, as the girl was of a higher class of society than I, and as her father had lots of money, it would have been to his advantage to hush the matter up, rather than to try to make trouble for me.
“That was the argument of my lawyer. He showed that I had everything to gain by having the girl alive, if she had liked me well enough to meet me in that lonely cottage, and I had everything to lose by making away with her.”
“A darned queer thing. I remember readin’ all about it,” interrupted John Hogan, while the man from Number 9 moistened his dry lips with his tongue, and looked over his shoulder in the frightened way he had.
“Well,” said Bill Wiley, “if the woman was alive, why didn’t she show up and clear you? If it was in the papers, she should have seen it.”
“It was in the papers,” said Hogan, “and a picture of him was in the New York World.”
“I have that right here,” said the man, touching his breast.
“How did you get out of Sing Sing after twenty-five years, when you got life?” asked Ikey, as he wiped the perspiration from his forehead.
“The woman came back, I suppose,” put in Higgins.
“Look at these,” said the man from Number 9. The four men bent eagerly forward, each with his hand outstretched to take the packet of papers which the man held in his trembling hands. “Look at this postmark—‘1885, Panama.’ ”