The rumor of the man who knew it all turned out to be based on fact. A solid, reliable-looking chap he was, and the reporters had him penned. He seemed reluctant to say anything at first, but finally admitted that he was walking through Collamore Street that night and came right on it. Must have been half-past ten or eleven, he thought. Two men fighting for a revolver—that’s all it was. He backed into a doorway on the other side, about opposite 491, and took it all in. The reporters got everything down to the minutest details, and you can imagine what the papers looked like next morning. Not Boston alone, but everywhere. Headlines you could read a block away. Here was the real thing, and the newspaper chaps know one of those when they see it. The authorities laid the leakage to the Rathbuns, but of course couldn’t hold them for anything. When they came to figure up the effect of the revolver episode on the case, it didn’t alter matters to any extent. While it had the look of some kind of framing of Findlay, it was at the same time shown by this very episode that he had his revolver in his hands after the shooting and was chasing himself home with it at the time it was taken from him. The only real loss sustained by the prosecution was the necessary abandonment of the contention that Findlay’s revolver had been concealed by himself after the shooting, for, as it now appeared, somebody else had shoved it up in the water conductor. But without this, the evidence against the man was amply sufficient. His violent threats—his frenzy at being shoved back out of the house by Haworth with the door slammed in his face—his position at the front window with his gun in his hand at the instant of the shooting—his mad flight from the grounds of the Cripps mansion, carrying (as it now appeared) his weapon with him—his incriminating behavior at the time of his arrest next morning in attempting to escape and then, when caught, endeavoring to get his wife to support him in his statement that he hadn’t left the house the evening before—all this, taken together with other evidence which had since been collected, meant nothing but swift conviction.