CHAPTER XXXVII.
THE MAIN RESOURCE.
Although the Camera Chap had so provokingly slipped through their hands, Mayor Henkle, Chief Hodgins, and young Gale were confident that no legal technicality could save his friend Carroll.
True, he was no longer in danger of going to the electric chair. The surgeons at the hospital, who at first believed that old Delancey Gale was fatally injured, had a little later revised that opinion, and announced that, barring unforeseen complications, he would pull through all right. But Carroll’s enemies were not greatly disappointed at the thought of his escaping capital punishment. A sentence of life imprisonment for the proprietor of the Bulletin would be quite satisfactory to them.
That they had enough evidence to convict him of “assault with intent to kill” they felt sure. Chief Hodgins, with the assistance of his young friend Gale, had built up a strong case against Carroll.
In the first place, there was the box in which the infernal machine had been inclosed. The explosion had smashed this box, but the pieces were all there, and they had managed to put them together again.
It was a small, oblong wooden box, and undoubtedly it had come from the Bulletin office. This could be proved by the marks stenciled on the lid.[Pg 43]
Carroll had been in the habit of receiving each day from a New York syndicate two half-tone cuts of woman’s fashions for publication in the Bulletin. These cuts were shipped in small, oblong wooden boxes. It was one of these boxes which had been used for the infernal machine.
But the strongest proof of all that Carroll had sent the explosive package to the Chronicle office was the fact that the package was addressed in his own handwriting.
Chief Hodgins had on file at police headquarters a personal letter which the proprietor of the Bulletin had once sent to him. He had taken this letter from the file, and compared it with the handwriting on the wrapper of the infernal machine. Although he was not a handwriting expert, he was willing to wager every dollar he had in the world that both had been penned by the same hand.
So confident was he that Carroll could not succeed in breaking down the case against him that when young Gale asked to be allowed to photograph the wrapper of the infernal machine and reproduce it on the front page of the Chronicle, the chief consented.