Page:The Black Cat v01no02 (1895-11).pdf/47

Rh Everything about the room was in perfect order. There had been no robbery, and the instrument used was found in her breast, where it had been driven to the heart. It was a gold ornament, such as a woman wears in her hair.

"We shall not attempt to defend the character of the dead woman, but we shall ask that justice be done.

"It is true that many a woman in this town had good reason to wish the murdered woman ill. It is true that there are men in the community who might have been driven by desperate hate, desperate love, or desperate jealousy, to do the deed, but, fortunately, before cruel suspicion made any blunder of that sort the police discovered the criminal. Almost simultaneously with the rumors of the murder came the reports of a mysterious woman found leaving the city. Within twelve hours this woman, who now stands at the bar, had been identified by no less than four people, who saw her in the vicinity of the scene of the crime either before or after it was committed.

"No one knew her. She refused to give any account of herself. She appeared to be in a state of great nervous excitement. The government will show that she entered the house shortly before the murder was committed; that she left it a few minutes after the deed was done; that on the very day of the murder she had high words with the dead woman, and that the instrument with which the deed was done was such an one as the prisoner was known to possess. Gentlemen of the jury," he concluded dramatically, "Fate plays no tricks of that sort. Fate fashions no such chain of circumstantial evidence as that which establishes the guilt of this woman and upon which we ask her conviction."

These were his words, and now that the janitor had testified that he saw the prisoner enter the building, a patrolman had declared that he saw her leaving it within fifteen minutes before the crime was discovered, and the dead woman's coachman had sworn to having overheard the prisoner using threatening language to his mistress,—after this and other circumstantial evidence had gone before the jury and remained unshaken by cross-examination, the prosecution announced that the case for the government was in.

In spite of the disappointment with which the spectators re-