She had to yield, and her husband left her to go to California. His employer persuaded Albert to buy a piece of land in California. "He seemed to be very anxious to locate me there."[482] Albert sent to his wife for the money, but the shrewd little woman sent only half. "I thought I would let him pay it out of his pay." With the same good sense the wife had not sold all the property when sent out alone among the real-estate men. "I did not sell the real estate," she said; "I thought there was too much expense."[483] She was not with her husband when the rupture came in California. The first news the anxious wife had of a change in her husband's affairs was when "Charley" came to her, as she was sitting one summer evening on the porch of a neighbor's house, and told her "Al" had quit them. "I do not know what to make of it," he continued: "I think he must be crazy or something."[484] It was not until his return that she learned the details of the painful experience he had been through. When it was heard that Albert, upon his return from California, had made restitution as far as he was able, by telling what he knew to the authorities, to aid them in bringing the principals in the crime to justice, there was consternation in the trust. One of its detectives had been captain of the company Albert was in during the Civil War. The captain now presented himself before Albert as he went to his work in Corry, Pennsylvania, where he had gone after his return from California, and became sociable rapidly. He had great plans for Albert, and came to the house to discuss them confidentially. Albert and his wife had been simple folks to start with, but they had learned a thing or two by this time. The captain's desire for confidential talk with his old comrade was so intense that it would have been rude in Albert's wife to thwart it. She packed off her daughter on an errand, and announced that she had a call up the street, and would leave them to themselves; but she did not add, as she might have done, that during her absence she would be represented by the Chief of Police, whose appetite for confidential communications was as keen as the captain's, but whose retiring disposition kept him in the dark seclusion of an adjoining room, with his ear to the crack of the door. "Wouldn't Albert like to go to Russia?" the captain asked his dear friend the private, whose existence he had never personally recognized when they were so close together during the Civil War. "If the Court will allow me to show by this witness," said the prosecuting attorney, "that the captain came there as a detective for the oil trust, and made a proposition, after the indictments were found, to Albert to flee the country, and go with him to Russia." One of the army of trust lawyers was instantly on his feet with "I object." The judge sustained him, and the testimony was shut out.