Dougherty felt that as the case stood he was making no headway. Coleman, who perhaps realized that he might be under suspicion, made no false moves. The detective resolved upon another plan of action. He decided to have Coleman charged with the robbery and arrested, after which he was certain to be released for lack of evidence. He calculated that an official discharge from any complicity in the stealing of the jewels would so reassure Coleman that he might afterward betray himself, through lack of caution, to watchful detectives. Coleman was accordingly arrested, and held for the grand jury in Cooperstown. The case against him was too weak to stand. The grand jurors were much absorbed in conclusions drawn from the blood-stains found on the floor of the basement of the Clark Estate office, and when it was shown that Coleman bore no sign of scratch or scar they promptly discharged him. Coleman left Cooperstown a free man, and chatted amicably with Dougherty as they rode together on the train to New York. On reaching the city they parted company at the Christopher Street elevated station, and Coleman rode on up town to his home, serenely confident of Dougherty's failure and of his own security. This was in October. From the moment of his arrival in the city Coleman was shadowed day and night. Detectives rented a room in a house across the street from Coleman's flat. Whenever he left his home they cautiously followed him. For a time he seemed to be making tests to learn whether or not he was being followed. Sometimes he would enter a large department-store, mingle with the crowds, and suddenly find his way out of a side door into a little-frequented street. But the detectives were equally wily. They adopted various disguises, and never let him out of their sight. After about two months they observed that Coleman began to make frequent trips toward Morningside Park. He made always for the same region, where he appeared to walk aimlessly about, but with his eyes fixed on the ground, as though counting his steps. On the morning of the third of January, during a heavy snowstorm, Coleman was followed to West 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, where, in a little open space near an iron-foundry, he scraped aside the snow, and began a small excavation of the earth. For some reason he failed to find the object of his search, and returned home with an air of dejection. One detective shadowed him homeward; the others did not wait for the falling snow to obliterate the traces of his excavation. They began digging in the same spot on a more generous scale, and eighteen inches below the surface unearthed a glass fruit-jar. The jar, on being lifted to the light, dazzled the eyes of the detectives, for it contained the missing jewels, which for six months had lain there in the earth where thousands of people had daily passed them by.