Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 11.pdf/436

 The Long Arm of Coincidence. peculiar " rublay-cord," were closely adjoin ing the tobacconist's shop. It was there fore quite possible, nay, even probable, that the prisoner's story of the way in which he became possessed of that damning piece of string was true. No witnesses were called for the defense : Mr. Denman had thus the advantage of ad dressing the jury without a reply from the prosecution, and the value of the last word in such cases is often inestimable. In a powerful and impressive speech, which lasted four hours, he pressed home the force of these striking coincidences in corroboration of the prisoner's story with great vigor and point. The judge, too, one of the ablest, most clear-headed and logical reasoners on the bench, laid considerable stress upon them in his summing-up, and the end of it was that, after a long deliberation, the jury gave the prisoner the benefit of the doubt and acquitted him, though it transpired after wards that at first ten of them were in favor of a verdict of " Guilty." It was a case that fairly bristled with coincidences on both sides, but those in support of the prisoner's innocence were the more strange, and the more striking. If the tramps had not discovered the diary and the railway guard's certificate when they did, and had not been prompted to show it to the landlord of the inn — if the attorney had

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not accidentally gone into that tobacconist's shop and seen the ball of" rublay-cord "lying on the counter — there would have been no independent evidence to corroborate the prisoner's story, and Johann Carl Franz would undoubtedly have been found guilty and hanged. He owed his life, therefore, to A "strange coincidence," to use a phrase By which such things are settled nowadays.

Disheartened by the acquittal of Franz, the police made no further attempt to solve the mystery of Martha Halliday's murder. Yet there was more than one problem con nected with the case, which the public would have liked to see worked out to a solution. Were there two distinct pairs of foreigners in the neighborhood of Kingswood on that eventful 9th and 1oth of June? The evidence certainly seemed to indicate that there were, and this in itself was a curious coincidence. While, strangest of all was the fact that neither of these two pairs of foreigners could be traced beyond Reigate and Kingswood, unless indeed the policeman at Sutton were correct in assuming that the persons he stopped were foreigners — a point on which some doubt was thrown. If they had been spirited away by supernatural agency they could not have vanished more completely or left less trace behind them. — Chambers's Journal.