Frieda confessed imperturbably to her attempt to blackmail Mrs. Balfame, adding (in free translation) that while she had no desire to see her arrested and punished, she saw no reason why she should not turn the situation to her own advantage. When Papa Kraus was asked if he had counselled the girl to demand five hundred dollars as the price of her silence, he repudiated the charge with indignation, but admitted that he did remark in the course of conversation that no doubt a woman who had killed her husband would be pleased to rid herself of a witness on such easy terms, and that it was Frieda's pious intention--and his own--that the blood-money should justify itself in the coffers of the German Red Cross. All this was very reprehensible, of course; but an imperfect sense of the minor social and legal immoralities was no argument that such blundering tactics were the natural corollary of a specific murder. To be sure, there were those that asserted with firm lips and pragmatical eyes that "anybody who will blackmail will do anything," but the police were accustomed to this line of ratiocination from the layman and knew better. Their efforts in every direction were equally futile. Behind the Balfame Place was a lane; Elsinore Avenue was practically the eastern boundary of the town, which had grown to the south and west. There were two or three lowly dwellers in this lane, and in due course the memory of one old man was refreshed, and he guessed he remembered hearing somebody crank up a machine that night, but at what time he couldn't say. It was after seven-thirty, anyhow, for he turned in about then, and he had heard the noise just before dropping off. That might have been any time up to eight or nine, he couldn't say, as he slept with his windows shut and couldn't hear the town clock. His cottage was directly across from a point where the second assailant, running out of the grove and grounds, would have climbed the fence to the lane if he had kept in a reasonably straight line. But there had been heavy rains between the night of the shooting and the awakening of the old man's memory, and not a track nor a footstep was visible.