“I guess you don’t like the job any more’n me,” stammered Raker, “and it ain’t like Joe Raker sneakin’ off this way; but what can I do with my woman? And maybe you, not having any wife—”
“No,” said Amos, very slowly, “I haven’t got any wife; it’s easier for me.” Nevertheless, the blood had ebbed from his swarthy cheeks.
“But how did it happen?” said Ruth.
“’Ain’t Amos told you?” said Raker, whose burden was visibly lightened—he pitied Amos sincerely, but it is much less distressful to pity one’s friends than to need to pity one’s self. “Well, this was the way: Sol Joscelyn was a rougher in the steel-works across the river, and he has a sweetheart over here, and he took her to the big Catholic fair, and Johnny was there. Johnny was the biggest policeman on the force and the best-natured, and he had a girl of his own, it came out, so there was no cause for Sol to be jealous. He says now it was his fault, and she says ’twas all hers; but my notion is it was the same old story. Breastpins in a pig’s nose ain’t in it with a pretty girl without common-sense; and that’s Scriptur’, Mrs. Raker says. But Sol felt awful bad, and he felt so bad he went out and took a drink. He took a good many drinks, I guess; and not being a drinkin’ man he didn’t know how to carry it off, and he certainly didn’t have any right to go back to the hall in the shape he was in. It was a friendly part in Johnny to take him off and steer him to the ferry. But there was a little bad look about it, though Sol went peaceful at last. Sol says they had got down to Front Street, and it was all friendly and cleared up, and he was terrible ashamed of himself the minnit he got out in the air. He was ahead, he says, crossing the street, when he heard Johnny’s little dog yelp like mad, and he turned round—of course he wasn’t right nimble, and it was a little while before he found poor Johnny, all doubled up on the sidewalk, stabbed in the jugular vein. He never made a sign. Sol got up and ran after the murderer. The mean part is that two men in a saloon saw Sol just as he got up and ran. Naturally they ran after him and started the hue-and-cry, and Sol was so dazed he didn’t explain much. Have I got it straight, Amos?”
“Very straight, Joe. You might put in that the prosecuting attorney, Frank Woods, is on his first term and after laurels; and that, unluckily, there have been three murders in this locality inside the year, and by hook or crook all three of the men got off with nothing but a few years at Anamosa; and public sentiment, in consequence, is pretty well stirred up, and not so particular about who it hits as hitting somebody; and that poor Sol had a chump of a lawyer—and you have the state of things.”
“But why are you so sure he wasn’t guilty?” said Ruth. The shocked look on her face was fading. She was thinking her own thoughts, not Amos’s, Raker decided.
“Partly on account of the dog,” said Amos. “First thing Sol said when they took him up was, ‘Johnny’s dog’s hurt too’; and true enough we found him (for I was round) crawling down the street with a stab in him. Now, I says, here’s a test right at hand; if the dog was stabbed by this young feller he’ll tell of it when he sees him, and I fetched him right up to Sol; but, bless my soul, the dog kinder wagged his tail! And he’s taken to Sol from the first. Another thing, they never found the knife that did it; said Sol might have throwed it into the river. Tommy rot!—I mean it ain’t likely. Sol wasn’t in no condition to throw a knife a block or two!”
“But if not he, who else?” said Ruth.
Amos was at a loss to answer her exactly, and yet in language that he considered suitable “to a nice young lady”; but he managed to convey to her an idea of the villanous locality where the unfortunate policeman met his death; and he told her that from the first, judging by the character of the blow (“no American man—a decent man too, like Sol—would have jabbed a man from behind that way; that’s a Dago blow, with a Dago knife!”), he had suspected a certain Italian woman, who “boarded” in the house beneath whose evil walls the man was slain. He suspected her because Johnny had arrested “a great friend of hers” who turned out to be “wanted,” and in the end was sent to the penitentiary, and the woman had sworn revenge. “That’s all,” said Amos, “except that when I looked her up, she had skipped. I have a good man shadowing her, though, and he has found her.”
“And that was what convinced you?”