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.