Months of idleness were interrupted only by odd jobs, like superintending the digging of a ditch or the sinking of a salt-well. Time and again, though he was drawing his pay of $125 a month, he went, as he told the story in court, to repeat the plea for "something to do." Finally, the elder of the managers, who was in California, sent for him. He was to be made "an independent man," the new promise ran, but really, as the sequel showed, was, if possible, to be kept out of the way of too inquisitive juries and prosecuting attorneys. The wife, treated as a mere pawn in the game, protested vehemently. "I went down to the Vacuum Oil Company's office, and asked C. to give Al something else to do. I didn't want him to go to California. He said that there was not anything that he knew that he could do."
"I don't want Al to go. I won't go. Give him something else to do."
"I have nothing else."[481]
She had to yield, and her husband left her to go to California. His employer persuaded Albert to buy a piece of land in California. "He seemed to be very anxious to locate me there."[482] Albert sent to his wife for the money, but the shrewd little woman sent only half. "I thought I would let him pay it out of his pay." With the same good sense the wife had not sold all the property when sent out alone among the real-estate men. "I did not sell the real estate," she said; "I thought there was too much expense."[483] She was not with her husband when the rupture came in California. The first news the anxious wife had of a change in her husband's affairs was when "Charley" came to her, as she was sitting one summer evening on the porch of a neighbor's house, and told her "Al" had quit them. "I do not know what to make of it," he continued: "I think he must be crazy or something."[484]
It was not until his return that she learned the details of the painful experience he had been through. When it was heard that Albert, upon his return from California, had made restitution as far as he was able, by telling what he knew to the authorities, to aid them in bringing the principals in the crime to justice, there was consternation in the trust. One of its detectives had been captain of the company Albert was in during the Civil War. The captain now presented himself before Albert as he went to his work in Corry, Pennsylvania, where he had gone after his return from California, and became sociable rapidly. He had great plans for Albert, and came to the house to discuss them confidentially. Albert and his wife had been simple folks to start with, but they had learned a thing or two by this time. The captain's desire for confidential talk with his old comrade was so intense that it would have been rude in Albert's wife to thwart it. She packed off her daughter on an errand, and announced that she had a call up the street, and would leave them to themselves; but she did not add, as she might have done, that during her absence she would be represented by the Chief of Police, whose appetite for confidential communications was as keen as the captain's, but whose retiring disposition kept him in the dark seclusion of an adjoining room, with his ear to the crack of the door.
"Wouldn't Albert like to go to Russia?" the captain asked his dear friend the private, whose existence he had never personally recognized when they were so close together during the Civil War. "If the Court will allow me to show by this witness," said the prosecuting attorney, "that the captain came there as a detective for the oil trust, and made a proposition, after the indictments were found, to Albert to flee the country, and go with him to Russia." One of the army of trust lawyers was instantly on his feet with "I object." The judge sustained him, and the testimony was shut out.
Albert's wife kept close to his side, and held him steady. No, Albert did not care to go to Russia. Advertisements of an alum-mine in Corry then began to appear in newspapers where Albert's attention could be called to them. By a lucky chance the captain happened to know the capitalists whose boundless powers of enterprise could find full outlet only by developing the hitherto unsuspected resources of Corry for supplying the nations of the earth with alum. By a joyful coincidence, these capitalists wanted for superintendent of their bottomless alum-mines just such a man as the captain knew his dear Albert to be. Would Albert like to go to Italy to learn the true science of alum manufacture, and to show the effete monarchies how an American could disembowel the earth of its alum? Salary, $5000 and expenses. No, Albert had no unslaked ambition to go to Italy as superintendent of mines of alum, or green cheese, or any other lunar commodity.
At least, Albert would take a drink? That poor Albert would do; and when he failed to come home at night his wife went up and down the streets seeking him. "A persistent effort had been made" by the trust, Mr. Matthews testified, "to get Albert out of the country. I was afraid they would get him away, as he might not be used in this case. Men had been sent there to get him drunk, and had debauched him."[485] Money was potent enough to persuade lawyers to make it a part of their professional duty to help in this. One of the trust's lawyers sat with Albert and its detective in the stall of a cheap saloon, and plied him with liquor to get from him some letters of Matthews' they wanted. "There they sat," said the keeper of the saloon; " ... they got what they called for, probably.... I couldn't tell how many drinks they got into Albert on that occasion; I think they drank there."[486]
While this courtship was in progress with Albert in Pennsylvania, wires were being pulled to get him indicted in New York. The grand-jury of Rochester was asked to indict him for receiving stolen property in a watch trade he had made seven years before. This would have ruined him as a witness in the forthcoming criminal case against the members of the oil trust, but the grand-jury decided that there was no evidence on which to indict. When Adam Cleber, a stolid-looking German laborer, who worked in the same place with Albert in Corry, took the stand for the State at the close, an eager excitement filled the court-room. The State's Attorney was known to have his darkest sensation still in reserve. What it was he would not, of course, disclose in advance, but those hardly less familiar than he with the evidence hinted that the fertile genius of the captain, having exhausted itself in the ideas of the trips to Russia and Italy, had fallen back upon the genius of his superiors, and had arranged to have Albert go a-hunting, and get a "bust-up" as much as possible like the one he had been induced to attempt upon his employers and partners.
"Did the captain tell you what he wanted you to do to Albert?" Cleber was asked.