Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; College graduates -- Fiction; Gangsters -- Fiction
"I saw him again when he was driving a milk-wagon. He delivered milk
at a friend's house where I chanced to be. The last time I saw him was
at my father's home. He had obtained employment in my father's plant as
an efficiency expert. He seemed to exercise some strange power over
father, who believed implicitly in him, until recently, when he
evidently commenced to have doubts; for the night that the man was at
our house I was sitting in the music-room when they passed through the
hallway, and I heard father discharge him. But the fellow pleaded to be
retained, and finally father promised to keep him for a while longer, as
I recall it, at least until certain work was completed at the plant.
This work was completed yesterday. That's all I know. I do not know
whether father discharged him again or not."
Harriet Holden had accompanied her friend to the police station, and was
sitting close beside her during the examination, her eyes almost
constantly upon the face of the prisoner. She saw no fear there, only an
expression of deep-seated sorrow for her friend.
The lieutenant was still asking questions when there came a knock at the
door, which was immediately opened, revealing O'Donnell with a young
woman, whom he brought inside.
"I guess we're getting to the bottom of it," announced the sergeant.
"Look who I found workin' over there as Compton's stenographer."
"Well, who is she?" demanded the lieutenant.
"A jane who used to hang out at Feinheimer's. She has been runnin'
around with this bird. They tell me over there that Compton hired her on
this fellow's recommendation. Get hold of the Lizard now, and you'll
have the whole bunch."
Thus did Sergeant Patrick O'Donnell solve the entire mystery with
Sherlockian ease and despatch.
At Jimmy's preliminary hearing he was held to the grand jury, and on the
strength of the circumstantial evidence against him that body voted a
true bill. Edith Hudson, against whom there was no evidence of any
nature, was held as a witness for the State, and a net was thrown out
for the Lizard which dragged in nearly every pickpocket in town except
the man they sought.
Jimmy had been in jail for about a week when he received a visitor. A
turnkey brought her to his cell. It was Harriet Holden. She greeted him
seriously but pleasantly, and then she asked the turnkey if she might go
inside.
"It's against the rules, miss," he said, "but I guess it will be all
right." He recalled that the sheriff had said that the girl's father was
a friend of his, and so assumed that it would be safe to relax the rules
in her behalf. He had been too long an employee of the county not to
know that rules are often elastic to the proper pressure.
"I have been wanting to talk to you," said the girl to Jimmy, "ever
since this terrible thing happened. Somehow I can not believe that you
are guilty, and there must be some way in which you can prove your
innocence."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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