“A virtuous and home-loving people, but crime occasionally disturbs the peace. Murders should always occur along navigable streams, so the victim can be sent cruising at once toward New Orleans and the still-vexed Bermoothes.”
Amidon thought he caught a gleam; but experience had taught him the unwisdom of anticipating the unfolding of Eaton’s purposes.
“Oh, there’s always a lot of crooks loafing along the river; they keep their skins filled with whiskey and they fish and shoot muskrats and do a little murdering on the side.”
“Interesting type,” said Eaton musingly. “If you were at Belleville this week, you must have heard of a murder down there—man found stabbed to death in a house-boat.”
Jerry grinned, pleased with his own perspicacity in having surmised the object of the interview. Murder was not, Amidon would have said, within the range of Mr. John Cecil Eaton’s interests; and yet this was not the first time that the lawyer’s inquiries had touched affairs that seemed wholly foreign to his proper orbit.
“I was there the day after they found the body. They had already arrested the wrong man and turned him loose—as usual. They always do that; and they’ll probably pick up some tramp who was visiting old college friends in New York when the murder was committed and indict him so the prosecuting attorney can show he’s on the job.”
“You shouldn’t speak in that manner of sworn officers of the law,” Eaton admonished. “Better that forty innocent men should be hanged than that one guilty man escape.”
Jerry fidgeted nervously as Eaton’s glasses were turned for a full minute upon the ceiling.
“A Cincinnati paper printed an item yesterday about that murder case, mentioning the arrest of a suspect at Henderson on the Kentucky shore.” Eaton hesitated. “The suspect’s name was Corrigan. You have known Corrigans, perhaps?”
There was a faint tinkle in the remote recesses of Jerry’s consciousness as the shot, so carelessly fired, reached the target.