On the night of the assassination, about three o'clock in the morning, a party of detectives called at Mrs. Surratt's house for the purpose of searching it to see whom they could find there, and demanded admittance. When informed of their visit and the purpose of it by Wiechmann, she said, "For God's sake let them in. I have been expecting the house to be searched."[20] How many people in Washington were expecting detectives to come that night to search their houses? Not one who was innocent of crime. Two nights later the inmates of this house--Mrs. Surratt, her daughter, and Miss Fitzpatrick--were put under arrest by the military police; and whilst they were waiting for a conveyance at near the hour of midnight the assassin Payne rang the door bell, and was taken in and placed under arrest by the officer in charge. When Mrs. Surratt was confronted by Payne she held up her hand and solemnly said, "Before God I do not know him, and never saw him."[21] It will be remembered that he had within the last three weeks to that time stayed in her house for three days and nights, and he was a man of such marked personality that he could not have been so easily forgotten. The defense, in her case, attempted to account for this by an alleged infirmity of sight, but they were unable to establish by testimony any infirmity of sight beyond what is common to her age of about forty-five.[22] It will be remembered that Payne had been hiding and skulking for three days and nights, and of all the houses in Washington her's was the only one to which he felt that he could go and entrust the secret of his presence. He could, under the circumstances in which he was placed, only have given this confidence to a co-conspirator. Having now given a brief synopsis of the testimony on which Mrs. Surratt was found guilty by the Commission, it will be in order for my readers to form their own conclusions as to her guilt or innocence. The writer only desires to say that additional testimony going to show the justice of the finding of the Commission in her case came out incidentally on the trial of John H. Surratt, and will also be found in the affidavit of L. J. Wiechmann, made after the military trial, in which he recounts a number of circumstances that had escaped his memory when on the witness stand, and which recurred to him in his subsequent reflections on the case. The testimony of Sergeants Dye and Cooper, given on the trial of Surratt, was that in passing Mrs. Surratt's house about ten minutes after the murder, a lady which Dye (having seen Mrs. Surratt at the military trial) believed to have been her, raised a window, and thrusting her head out, asked them what was wrong down town.[23]