That was the conclusion which we were being forced to accept. But the mystery of the dynamite purchase was still unsolved. Holt said we could not guess the reason why he was withholding the answer to it. I was inclined to agree with him just then. I couldn’t guess. But he betrayed in one of his replies the real factor which was to solve the mystery. Major Pullman asked: “Why did you decide to go to the Capitol?” “Merely,” replied the thin figure in the chair, “to get the most prominent place in the country. You see I wanted to call attention to my appeal.” In this he had succeeded. The whole country was working on the case. If our feeling that Holt had bought more explosives was no more than a theory at first, it was strengthened when he admitted that he had spent nearly $275 in two weeks, had only six sticks of dynamite to show for it, and was able to account for only $50. He denied that he had ever been in the German Club in New York, reiterated that he was born in the United States, dodged the exact city, then suggested Milwaukee, said that the name of the college he had attended in Texas “wouldn’t come,” and sidestepped cleverly any admission which might allow us to trace the dynamite purchase. Thus ended Saturday, July 3, which had started out as a holiday. I left two men to watch Holt, and went home, tired out, and not at all satisfied. While we had been busy with the prisoner, the wires to Boston and the trains to Chicago had been carrying out their routine tasks of syndicating news. A police officer in Cambridge in reading the description of Holt which had flashed out to the newspapers detected a familiar ring to the natural phrase “shambling walk” which had been used to describe Holt’s gait. Thousands of men whom we encounter in daily life have shambling walks, but to this officer only one man had a shambling walk in which he was interested, and that man was Erich Muenter, a Harvard instructor, whom he had suspected of wife-murder nine years before. Nine years is a long time, and the average person cannot recall offhand the gait of anyone whom he last saw nine years ago, but those two words had evidently typified to the Cambridge officer the murderer who got away. When the news photographs followed the description to Boston and the Cambridge police saw them, they were not so sure, for Muenter had had a beard, and in his Cambridge days his head was not bandaged. But suspicion had been aroused, and that was enough to issue the news throughout the country during the night. Reporters in Ithaca tried to verify it from Holt’s associates at Cornell, and failed, reporters two thousand miles away in Dallas tried to verify it from Holt’s confused father-in-law, and failed. Dallas, however, supplied the particulars of his previous life so far as anyone seemed to know them, and these particulars were again relayed, verified, and amplified in every city in which Holt had ever been known in recent years.