future until her husband was in his grave. But all during that long service, while the new parson [Pg 99]discoursed unctuously upon the virtues and eminence of the slain, she had the sensation of holding her breath.

[Pg 99]

It was four days from the night of the murder before she consented to see the reporters. Meanwhile every suspected person had proved an alibi, including the red-haired Miss Foxie Bell, and the indignant and highly respectable Miss Mamie Russ, who officiated at the telephone. She had known the deceased, yes, and once or twice she had driven out to one of the roadhouses with him, where a number of her friends were indulging in a quiet Sunday afternoon tango, but she had merely looked upon him as a kind fatherly sort of person; and at the hour of his death she was asleep, as her landlady could testify.

Old Dutch had indignantly repudiated the charge of employing gunmen, and had even attended the funeral and shed tears. Whatever the faults of the deceased, they were not of a nature to antagonise permanently the erring members of his own sex. Moreover, he had been an able politician, respected of his enemies, and was now glorified by his cowardly and untimely taking off.

The local police had an uneasy suspicion that the assassin was one of their "pals"—in that small and democratic community, where every man was an Elk from the banker to the undertaker. They were quite ready to drop the case, loudly ascribing the deed to an ordinary housebreaker, or to some unknown enemy from out the impenetrable rabbit warrens of New York City.

The newspaper men were chagrined and desperate. The Balfame Case had proved uncommonly magnetic to the New York public. They had done their best to[Pg 100] create this interest, and now were on their mettle to "make good." But they were beginning to wish they had waited for at least a lantern's ray at the end of the dark perspective before exciting the public with descriptions of the winding picturesque old street of the ancient village of Elsinore; the stately old-time residence at its head which had housed (in more or less discomfort) three generations of Balfames, the sinister grove of trees that had sheltered the dastardly assassin, the prominence and political importance of David Balfame who had inherited this ancestral estate, and played among those trees in childhood; his unsuspecting and vocal return at an early hour to be shot down at his own gate.

[Pg 100]

All this 

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