Waters was a man well advanced in years. The strain of the appearance at the coroner’s jury and the preliminary hearings in the police court appeared slightly to unbalance his mind. The spectacle of the murdered man that he beheld through the windows of the vacant house was constantly before him. He was a man who had gone through a placid life and never figured in any scene of shocking violence or of murder. After the disposal of the Rosendorn case Waters became possessed of a mania for climbing telegraph poles commanding the windows of vacant houses. Here and there and everywhere about the city he might be seen spiking himself up a pole, peering intently, and scuttling down. He was a familiar figure to all policemen and many citizens. He made a practice of haunting police headquarters, and, his imagination beginning evidently to visualise the first scene, once or twice led futile parties into vacant houses with the declaration that he had discovered a body. The police reporters humoured him and he came to know the most of them, particularly Lanagan, who found Waters’ case was of profound interest. Several stories were written about him and his self-appointed cross-beam task of discovering murdered people in vacant houses. And then--he “made good.” Weeks of poking and prying and shinning up and down telegraph poles brought their reward and Waters discovered another crime: that of Ratto. He had been slain with an ordinary blackjack, which was found by the body. During the three days of excitement following the discovery of the commission merchant’s body Waters thrived upon the publicity that he received. He carried bundles of papers containing accounts of his “find” and with his picture taken in many ways: climbing up telegraph poles, peering into a window from a cross-tree--a camera man nearly lost his life slipping on a cross beam taking this picture, and as he looked ten years ago, his last “gallery” picture unearthed “exclusively” by a proud “cub” reporter. He was as tickled as a boy, and it was confidently predicted around police headquarters that he would find an end in an insane asylum from pure joy in a month.