If we couldn’t talk to anyone else we could to each other and I guess we did more gabbing going down in the taxi and across in the boat than Mrs. Cresset had done for years. She told me about the night when Cokesbury had come to her house. It was wonderful to see how luck was with him—the way it sometimes is with sinners. Usually at that hour she was round in the kitchen and when he knocked would have opened the door and seen his face in the lamplight. But she’d gone upstairs early as her little daughter had a cold. To go back over the small things that happened would make you sure some evil power was protecting him. That morning the little girl’s cold wasn’t bad and she’d gone to school as usual. But at the schoolhouse she heard that the dancing bear—the one I saw in Longwood which had been performing along the pike on its way back to Bloomington—had been at Jaycock’s farm and might be round by Cresset’s that afternoon. Like all children, she was crazy about the bear, and after school hours she and a chum slipped off and stood around in the damp, waiting. But the bear did not show up and when she came home, crying with disappointment, the cold was heavy on her. Her mother bundled her off to bed and went up early to sit with her. Only for that, Cokesbury would probably have been landed in jail weeks before, the State saved money and two innocent men saved shame and suffering. "That’s the way it is with the Devil’s own," I said. "I guess he takes care of them for a while; jollies them along the downward path." "It looks like that was the case," said Mrs. Cresset, her kind, rosy face very solemn. "But the power of evil gets broke in the end. ’Murder will out’—that’s true if anything is. Think of that man feeling so safe and every hour the cords tightening round him." "And _we_ did it," said I, awful proud. "We found the cords and then pulled on them." "We did," says she. "I never thought to be the one to put a fellow-creature behind bars, but I have and my conscience tells me I’ve done right." My, but we both felt chesty! The next morning Babbitts phoned me to say he’d be over Sunday evening. The information of "Our Suspect" would be given to the press Sunday morning for the Monday papers and after it was in he’d come across and tell me about it. Mr. Whitney had arranged for me not to go back to work till Tuesday and though I suppose the rest was good for me, the strain of waiting wore on me something dreadful. I kept wondering how Cokesbury had done it, and how he was going to explain this and account for that. Most of Sunday I lay on the bed trying to read a novel, but a great deal more interested in the hands of the clock than I was in the printed pages.