The evidence tending to establish the guilt of Augustus Findlay in the case of the shooting to death of Charles Michael Haworth was so overwhelming from the point of view of newspaper readers, that it threatened to make the case uninteresting—a threat, however, which was soon swept into the discard. For a few days, though, it looked unpromising in the extreme to those who revel in newspaper sewerage. The facts were so plain and Findlay’s guilt so evident that no room was left for enthralling suspicions as to others—for gossip and scandal, for the laying bare of nauseous details concerning the habits and lives of loathsome people, and all those choice morsels of offal that newspaper addicts go after so ravenously. It was simply that this Findlay man, the murderer, had always been threatening to put a bullet into the Haworth man, the murdered, and had finally done so, being worked up to a sufficient frenzy in his half-drunken condition, by finding the said Haworth calling upon his—Findlay’s—wife. He had thereupon followed him home, flourishing a revolver in his face most of the way and shouting the most murderous threats and maledictions, and finally had shot him from outside the Cripps mansion on Torrington Road (where Haworth lived) getting it there through one of the front windows. Then he had run home and tried to make his wife uphold him in his statement that he hadn’t left the house all the evening. If that wasn’t enough to land him in the chair, what was? To the authorities, however, it wasn’t quite so easy navigation. No one had seen Findlay do the deed; no revolver had been found; no bullet marks in the room had yet been discovered. It was true that everything pointed to him as the murderer, but pointing wasn’t enough. It answers very nicely for the general public, but doesn’t go with a Grand Jury. And there was that obstinate old woman who undoubtedly had intimate knowledge of the entire episode from A to Z—knowing the persons involved, the motives behind the murderous deed, and every circumstance leading up to it;—for hadn’t she run out and warned a patrolman in Jamaica Plain nearly a week before the event? Fully aware of this and more, yet keeping her mouth as securely closed as if officially padlocked. More important still if it was a fact—and a word or two she’d dropped just after the shooting made it look that way—she’d been an eyewitness of the murder. Yet so far nothing could be got out of her on the subject. But no mistake was made about Amelia Temple. It was seen from the first that the only chance was in giving it to her easy and waiting patiently for results. No pressure. On a sign of that she’d have cheerfully gone to prison for life or permitted herself to be hung by the neck until dead, before she’d have let out a word. So they kept careful watch on her without interfering in any way with her freedom or giving her the least idea they were doing it.