But of this misinformation, of course, I was at the time ignorant, as
was all the city ignorant of the truth. What happened was otherwise,
nor was the truth learned even by the great metropolitan journals of
the North, which now recognized the existence of a "big story", and
added their keener noses to the trail. The great fact overlooked by
them all was that they pursued no criminal, but a man of education, I
may fairly say of brains.
In my law practise many baffling cases came to me, because I most
liked, precisely, that sort of case. Once, for instance, a family of
my town well-nigh was disrupted by a series of anonymous letters, done
in typewriting, accusing an honorable man of dishonorable conduct. The
letters left the man's wife in an agony of loyalty and suspicion
alike. He brought me the letters, and to me the case was simple from
the start. I got the repair slips of a certain typewriter house, and
compared them until I found a machine with a bent letter M--knowing
as I did that each machine has its own individuality as ineradicable
and as inescapable as any personal handwriting. So at last I went to a
small outlying city, and going into a business house there asked to
see the stenographer in private. "My dear Miss ----," I said to her,
"why do you persist in sending these letters to Mr. ----?" I laid them
before her, and she wept and confessed, very naturally.
That was merely jealousy of a discharged employee; and it was easy as
a case--easier I always thought, than the probate case I won over a
contested signature charge filed by certain heirs under a will. In
this case I merely went to the dead man's earlier home and learned his
history. Time out of mind he, a thrifty and respected German, had held
some petty county office or other; and by going over old county
warrants and receipts signed in forty years by my man, I discovered
what I already knew--that a man's signature changes many times during
his life, especially if he begins life as an uncultured immigrant and
advances to a fair business success later in his life: so that his
later signatures on records proved his signature in his will.
Again, liking these simple mysteries, I had long ago learned to laugh
at the old and foolish assertion that murder will out, that not the
most skilful criminal can long conceal a capital crime. It is not
true. No one knows how many murders and other crimes go unsolved or
even unknown. The trouble with murderers, as I knew well enough, was
that they lacked mentality. And often I said to myself that were it in
my heart to kill a man, I assuredly could do so, and all my life
escape unsuspected of the crime.