f the finger marks of the knife handle; and
among his glass records he had a great array of fingerprints of women and
girls, collected during the last fifteen or eighteen years, but he
scanned them in vain, they successfully withstood every test; among them
were no duplicates of the prints on the knife.
The presence of the knife on the stage of the murder was a worrying
circumstance for Wilson. A week previously he had as good as admitted to
himself that he believed Luigi had possessed such a knife, and that he
still possessed it notwithstanding his pretense that it had been stolen.
And now here was the knife, and with it the twins. Half the town had
said the twins were humbugging when they claimed they had lost their
knife, and now these people were joyful, and said, "I told you so!"
If their fingerprints had been on the handle--but useless to bother any
further about that; the fingerprints on the handle were NOT theirs--that
he knew perfectly.
Wilson refused to suspect Tom; for first, Tom couldn't murder anybody--he
hadn't character enough; secondly, if he could murder a person he
wouldn't select his doting benefactor and nearest relative; thirdly,
self-interest was in the way; for while the uncle lived, Tom was sure of
a free support and a chance to get the destroyed will revived again, but
with the uncle gone, that chance was gone too. It was true the will had
really been revived, as was now discovered, but Tom could not have been
aware of it, or he would have spoken of it, in his native talky,
unsecretive way. Finally, Tom was in St. Louis when the murder was done,
and got the news out of the morning journals, as was shown by his
telegram to his aunt. These speculations were unemphasized sensations
rather than articulated thoughts, for Wilson would have laughed at the
idea of seriously connecting Tom with the murder.
Wilson regarded the case of the twins as desperate--in fact, about
hopeless. For he argued that if a confederate was not found, an
enlightened Missouri jury would hang them; sure; if a confederate was
found, that would not improve the matter, but simply furnish one more
person for the sheriff to hang. Nothing could save the twins but the
discovery of a person who did the murder on his sole personal account--an
undertaking which had all the aspect of the impossible. Still, the
person who made the fingerprints must be sought. The twins might have no
case WITH them, but they certainly would have none without him.
So Wilson mooned around