Page:A La California.djvu/357

Rh With a sensation, beside which seasickness is delightful, we rush from the room and regain the alley, determined to see no more.

One more sensation is yet in store for us. As we emerge on Jackson street once more, we are met by an officer, who tells us that another of those horrible, mysterious murders of fallen women, which have horrified the community over and over again, and baffled and set at defiance the detective powers of the city officials, has been perpetrated in Stout's Alley. He leads up into the alley, and along it to within a few yards of Washington street, and an officer at the door, who is keeping back the curious crowd of men and women which was gathered on hearing the news, admits us to the house where the tragedy has been enacted. There are two rooms on the main floor, which had been occupied by the French woman, now dead. In the front one is a bed luxuriously furnished, a bureau, wardrobe, table, etc., and in the back room a wash-stand, stove, and some cooking utensils and crockery. Her male friend slept up stairs, and knew nothing of the tragedy going on below. The police are busily at work searching for clues, to lead to the detection of the murderer, but all in vain. On the floor in the front room, the body of the miserable victim is lying in a pool of blood, the skull fractured by a blow with a chair, which lies shivered by her side, and the throat cut from ear to ear with a dull knife, taken from the other room by the murderer. The bed is drenched with blood, and a pillow, thrown against the wall at the other side of the room, is