When asked if he suspected anybody, the poor music teacher in particular, he expressed himself as unwilling to suspect anybody, and declared that he could never believe the music teacher guilty, except under the most positive evidence. He was too simple a man, he said, to do anything of the sort; a man who had no bad habits to indulge, and one of that stamp whom the possession of eight hundred dollars, however he might have obtained it, would have driven crazy.
I managed to get entrance into the young man's office in New York, and make careful examination of everything there, such clothes as he had in the wardrobe, and everything else, even to a hollow cane, or walking-stick, in which, to my surprise, I found money—good money, but nothing corresponding with any of the bills lost by the widow, which were nearly all large ones, with a few small ones,—all the latter the issue of a Newark bank. Finding the money in this hollow cane made me suspicious of the man's general character. Why carry good money in such a "purse"? It would be a convenient thing to conceal counterfeit money in, I thought; and then I said to myself, "Why not good to keep stolen money in too?" and finally I answered, "Yes, and good money too;" for not one person in ten thousand would ever think to look in such a place for money. Besides, the young man's name was engraved upon the silver head of the cane, and that fact ought rather to ward off suspicion against him.
In these and like ways I was always fluctuating in my mind regarding the young roof-maker; and as I had pursued matters under the inspiration of my sympathy for the widow in her loss (with a slight prompting, I confess, on the score of her bewitching ways and her delicate beauty) quite beyond what I would have felt warranted in doing in another case under like circumstances; so I told the madame one day, when she called at my office, as she not unfrequently did, that I thought we must give up the search; that probably nothing but the death-bed repentance of the thief would ever disclose who took the money, and that all had been done which could possibly be done, I thought, to ferret out the thief. It was easy for him to get the larger bills changed to small ones in New York, and get the Newark money out of his hands, and as for the gold, there was no way to identify that; that either one of the boarders, or some visitor, had probably taken the money; and so much time having passed since it was taken, that we might as well expect the dead to rise that day in Greenwood as to expect to find the thief or the money.
At this madame burst into tears over the loss of the money, as I supposed, and I tried to calm her; but she wept quite frantically. I had never seen her before save in a calm, dignified state, and knew not what to make of it; but she said,—
"Not for the gone money, I weep, sir; but what you said of the dead in Greenwood: there are all mine."
I had known that her children and husband were buried in an obscure quarter of Greenwood, but forgot that fact when I spoke, and stupidly made allusion to that cemetery. The madame's tears re-strengthened my sympathy; and she told me a dream, too, which she had had three or four nights before, with such unction, that while I laughed in my sleeve at it, I could not, for the life of me, but express in my face believing astonishment. She said at the same time that she did not believe in dreams at all, yet this one was so startlingly realistic in its personages, localities, etc., that it seemed to her more a veritable history of facts than the shadowings of a disordered imagination in semi-sleep. The substance of the dream was, that I had been over to her house again, had made another search, and in the room occupied by the music teacher and the young roofer (for they occupied the same room, the largest in the little house, but had separate beds); and that while I was shaking some clothes belonging to one of them, she could not tell which, down fell a five dollar gold piece, and dropped on the carpet at a point exactly equidistant from the two beds, after rolling on the carpet in a small curve. Madame derided the dream while she told it, yet it evidently had made some impression on her mind; discovering which, together with my re-aroused sympathies for her over her widowhood and the loss of the money, I assured myself that I ought to make further trial, and thought I would revisit her house and make further search.
I did so two days afterwards, at my first leisure, and reviewed the whole affair there. In searching the roof-maker's room again, which I did out of a sort of deference to the widow's dream, but without the slightest expectation that I should find any clew to the thief, I came across a garment which I had not seen before, either in his closet there or in the wardrobe at his office in New York. It was an old vest, and, strange to say, madame did not remember to have ever seen the roof-maker wear it. Yet there it hung with his clothes. Perhaps it was the music teacher's; but at any rate we, in a sort of listless way, examined it; finding nothing but a few cloves and spices in it, such as too many young men carry in their pockets in order to draw therefrom disguises of a bad liquor-smelling breath; and a crumpled piece of letter paper, quite black on one side, which I was inclined to throw aside; and I should have done so, except from my habit (rather than judgment, in this case) of examining everything.
Unfolding this, which proved to be a strip of nearly triangular form, about two and a half inches wide on the line of one "leg," by four or five inches by the other "leg," I noticed some letters and words on the piece. It was evidently a part of a letter torn off; and I reflected that I had seen writing of that same style somewhere, and turning up the left-hand upper corner of the piece, to flatten it out more, I discovered the letters "ati," upon it, and it flashed into my mind at once where that piece came from. I made no remark to the widow at this point, but told her we would now take the vest in charge, and go down and look into the secretary again. She withdrew from the drawer the letters and papers she had shown me on my first visit, and which I had charged her to keep safe, and I was not long in finding the proper letter (the one I have described heretofore), and adjusting the torn piece to it, it fitted exactly, and the rest of the word—Cincinn—was added to the "ati," and place of date; and then I called Madame K.'s attention to it. My conclusion was, that the thief had, in some way, by accident torn that letter at the time he took the money, and that somehow the piece had gotten into his pocket and he had forgotten it. But it was carefully folded, as I saw, when I essayed to fold it back to the shape I found it in.
While I was doing this, the widow exclaimed,—
"Why Mr. ——, I remember all about it now. I tore the letter to get a piece to wrap up the two ten dollar gold pieces in;" and I saw it was just the fit size as folded. So we had traced the gold pieces into the roofer's vest pocket; and all the rest was clear now. He was the thief. But how should we prove the vest to be his, if he should deny it? I did not wish to leave any loose place in the evidence, and I knew well enough that the roofer was "sharp," and I began to conceive that he would not be easily caught. It would not do to speak to anybody in the house to inquire if he had been seen to wear that vest, for he might be innocent, and the widow did not wish any of her boarders to know that another one was suspected; but fortunately on the inside of the neck of the vest was a little piece of silk, on which, in imitation of needlework, was stamped the maker's name, "H. Schneider, Merchant Tailor, 565 Sixth Avenue, N. Y.," as I made it out with some difficulty. I rolled up the vest in a paper, bade the widow good afternoon, and informing her when she would probably see me next, left.