Chapter IX

WHAT THE HONORABLE CORONER DAVIS THOUGHT, AND WHAT ROBERTSON, JR., WAS CONVINCED OF.

Mr. Davis, the coroner charged with this mysterious affair, was an intelligent, laborious man; but, like all his colleagues in the American magistracy, he had so often encountered the difficulties with which judicial inquests are armed in the Northern States, that he hardly hoped to obtain a prompt result.

A fortnight later the inquest had made great progress, owing to the reward of one hundred dollars promised to each person who should furnish useful information in the cause of justice.

Toby naturally presented himself to declare that the barrel of tar fastened to the leg of the drowned woman was the one stolen from him on the night of the ball, at two or three o’clock in the morning. He was certain of it, for it was at that very moment that he left his post as watch on Wharf 43 to go and warm himself in Anchor tavern. This inn was on the wharf, seven or eight hundred yards above Shakespeare’s tavern, going up toward Yorkville.

After Toby came Thompson, the keeper of the livery stable, and his driver, Tom Katters; but the latter could only tell the magistrate of his traveling in company with three Indians and a woman as far as the first houses in Yorkville.

Beyond this stopping-place the legal officers lost all traces of the unhappy Miss Ada and her kidnappers.

Captain Young and his skilful agents searched in vain all the taverns, lodging-houses, dens, and suspicious places from the borders of the river to Yorkville, and discovered nothing which could throw light upon the matter.

This campaign served only to accomplish the arrest of a hundred offenders against the law--people important to capture, but absolutely innocent of the crime which excited public opinion in the highest degree.

Mary, on being questioned several times, invariably told the same story of the kidnapping, which she had witnessed, as had all Miss Ada’s guests. The servants affirmed--and there was no reason to suppose that she lied--that she, like every one else, had taken the scene for a carnival joke.

Mary took care not to speak Colonel Forster’s name, whom she evidently suspected as she had told Mr. Saunders, for she feared to compromise herself, and be accused of being an accomplice. Besides it might be that her silence was caused by her thinking it impossible that the brilliant officer could have had any part in the crime of which her mistress had been a victim, admitting that the drowned woman really was, whatever she had said, the unhappy Miss Ada. Moreover, when the coroner had proposed to her to return to the morgue to again examine the body, the young girl began to tremble and weep, and said that probably she was mistaken, but that not for any amount of money could she have the courage to confront such a spectacle a second time.

Mr. Davis, therefore, had to resign himself to go no farther with the maid; but, without her suspecting it, he placed her under a constant surveillance.

However, the examination of this girl had not been useless, for to her Mr. Davis owed the enumeration and detailed description of the jewels which Miss Ada had on the day when she was carried off.

Mary, in giving this information of utmost importance, showed so good a memory and so much intelligence, that the coroner could have each of these jewels estimated, drawn, and photographed--they easily found those who had sold them--so that the principal jewelers in America and Europe could be notified.

The assassin, it is true, could change the setting of the necklaces, bracelets, and rings; but the coroner counted much on the ear-rings of the victim, for the discovery of the murderer. He knew that these diamonds were solitaires, valued at ten thousand dollars. Now, it is difficult to get rid of stones of this cut without awaking suspicion, even in America.

What baffled the honorable magistrate was that Miss Ada had been taken beyond the wharf from which the barrel of tar had been stolen.

Now, as the report of Doctor O’Neel demonstrated that the victim had ceased to live before being thrown into the water, he concluded that the murderer had retraced his steps with the corpse, and, that, not being provided with a rock to sink the body he took the first object he could lay hands on.

This first deduction naturally led the coroner to a second--that the assassin had been able to descend only by water from the place where Tom Katters had parted from him--Miss Ada being still living, since the coachman had heard the man who brought her talking to her--to Wharf 43, from which the barrel had been taken.

Mr. Davis thus succeeded in establishing this first point: On leaving the carriage, the unknown had embarked with the young woman, had choked, poisoned, or asphyxiated her by means of a poison or narcotic impossible to state what, and had afterward thrown her into the river.

The lieutenant of the Liberia had come to make the intelligent magistrate the declaration which he had previously made to the Robertson agency, that on Tuesday or Wednesday night, the night of the kidnapping, he came near running down a boat in which were an Indian and a woman--a boat going towards Williamsburg--and that this woman had uttered a cry of fear; but this only made it supposable that the crime had been committed on the other side of the river, for all these shores receiving tides, the body might have been as easily carried out by the waves as to have descended from the top of the river with the current.

On the opposite shore, at Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Brooklyn, the search had not produced any better results than at Yorkville.

None of the men of the Firefly, not even those of the boat we saw skirting Staten Island, came to the aid of the police. In the first place, the crew of the yacht were absolutely ignorant of the aim of the excursion which we have described, and, moreover, although the sailors of the boat knew that they had run into a yawl, they knew no more.

In their natural haste to save themselves they were no more anxious about those who had made them run so great a danger than about the stout man, who, no doubt, as an apology for the cold bath he had made them take, had given them each one hundred dollars.

As for Saunders, it was impossible to obtain anything, whatever, from him. Two or three times Mr. Davis had gone to his house, and had questioned him as shrewdly as possible; but the unhappy man, at the mere name of Miss Ada, rolled his haggard eyes wildly, muttered incoherently, accused himself of her death, asked her forgiveness, burst into sobs, then offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who would discover her murderer.

He talked at random, with such good results, that the coroner, agreeing with Mr. Kelly and Mr. Mortimer, gave up tormenting him, and this in spite of Captain Young, who swore at them, and remembering the recognition he had witnessed at the morgue, bet one thousand dollars against two hundred dollars that the wealthy merchant was the murderer.

There was only one call which Mr. Saunders received without terror--that of William Dow. He remembered that the latter had offered him his arm to lead him from Bellevue Hospital, and in his presence he wandered a little less.

So the gentlemanly detective went to see him from time to time, under the pretext of inquiring about his health.

Mr. Robertson, Jr., who followed the progress of this search with interest, as will be understood, reasoned quite differently from Mr. Davis, and it must be acknowledged that his deductions, considering the facts within his personal knowledge, were no less honorable than those of the magistrate.

According to the intelligent agent, Miss Ada was accidentally drowned on the shore of Staten Island. Her body, borne off by the current, did not come to the surface until out to sea, where some fisherman may have drawn it up in his nets, and, tempted by the precious jewels that the young woman wore, the man had completely robbed her, then thrown her into the water, after fastening to her leg a tar barrel, whose presence in his fishing-boat was very natural. This tar barrel might be that which had been stolen from Toby, or the fisherman might have stolen it himself a few days before, or some one might have sold it to him; but it might also simply be a barrel bearing the same mark as those stored on Wharf 43, and not the particular one that had disappeared from that wharf.

It will be seen that Davis and Robertson, while starting from a different point, reached the same result--the certifying the identity of the body of the drowned.

The coroner also had taken every measure to learn the past of Ada Ricard, and by some brief information collected in New York, and made more complete by former servants of the young woman and by the friends of her first lover, Thomas Cornhill, he had been able to go as far back as her marriage with James Gobson, which took place at Buffalo, but, as we know, only to be broken at the end of a year by the divorce courts.

The documents relative to this case described the brutality of Gobson toward his wife; and, when he learned that this man--who had disappeared for more than six months--had been seen at Jefferson, forty-eight hours distant from New York, a few days before the crime, Mr. Davis no longer doubted that he was the guilty man.

It was equally the opinion of William Dow, contrary to all the reasonings of the terrible Captain Young.

Now it only remained to arrest James Gobson; but this was not easy, for it was very evident that the murderer, having committed the crime and taken possession of the jewels, had made all despatch to put all possible distance between him and the law.

Now, unfortunately, they had only one of those imperfect clews which serve no end, and no photograph, whatever.

William Dow, who had gone to Buffalo, had brought back nothing interesting in regard to the antecedents of the unfortunate Ada, as no one had been able to give any information.

Gobson, who, when he lived at Buffalo, was often absent on business, had one day returned from the West with her whom he had made his wife, and as this union with a girl whose past and family he did not know, had separated the merchant from his relatives as well as the majority of his friends, it became almost impossible to find out about Miss Ada before the time of her marriage.

Was the name of Ricard, which she had taken or resumed on arriving in New York, her own? Mr. Davis would not have ventured to affirm it, and Mr. Dow doubted it.

Matters, as we see, were progressing slowly, and the mystery seemed to become more impenetrable every day.

Albert Moor was the only one who had brought his work to a successful end. In a fortnight after his night at the morgue with William Dow he had delivered to Mr. Kelly a head in wax, which in the opinion of all who had known Ada Ricard was her striking image.

This head had been placed, according to regulations, in a glass case outside the exhibition-room, in the large public hall, and every day attracted considerable of a crowd.

It was to remain there until the matter was settled, in some way or another, to be afterwards placed in the museum of curiosities at Bellevue Hospital, where they keep the heads of murderers and those of their victims.