Furthermore, after treatment, and not having spoken to any others in the meantime, Roden gave his statement that night to General Guerre, and later to General Fleming. These accounts agreed in almost every detail with one another and with the one he gave me, twenty-four years later, in the presence of Generals Fleming and Guerre, who verified that this statement differed in no essential respect from what he had told them at the scene when questioned by them on the night of September 8, 1935. Except for one detail, it also agrees with the testimony he gave on September 16 of that same year, at the Odom inquest. It was his belief at first that Dr. Weiss fired but once. However, mulling the violent images of that night over in his mind, he later came to the conclusion that the doctor fired twice; this, incidentally, is the only conclusion that would square with the two minor injuries he sustained on his right hand and left wrist. In any case, the possibility of conspiratorial collusion among these four in time to have agreed on a falsified account of what took place before their eyes, would appear to be ruled out in its entirety. The inevitable corollary of such a proposition is that the otherwise uncontradicted testimony of these four witnesses is a factual account of what took place. None the less, one cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility, however remote, that evidence can be framed, as it has been in documented cases--Sacco-Vanzetti, Tom Moony, Leo M. Frank; and that circumstantial evidence, even where no single link in the chain appears weak, leads now and then to false conclusions. But it can be said that in this instance the overwhelming weight of available evidence indicates that Weiss’s bullet was the cause of Huey Long’s death, and that no bullet from the guns of one or another of his bodyguards was a contributing factor in putting an end to his career. The available evidence likewise appears to indicate beyond a reasonable doubt that the emergency operation was a contributing cause of death in the following respect: Had a decision to perform a frontal laparotomy been deferred, and had in its stead a removal of the damaged right kidney made possible the tying off of the blood vessels supplying this organ to halt the hemorrhage that was draining off the victim’s life blood, Huey Long might none the less have died of peritonitis, from “soilage” into the abdominal cavity by the two small punctures of the large bowel. But once the decision to operate from the front was carried into effect, the only door to possible--by no means “certain,” but possible--recovery was irrevocably closed. Even Dr. Vidrine realized that a second operation to halt the kidney hemorrhage was something his patient could not survive.