natural course of events, other men will come and go and unconsciously
tread out your traces, provided you have made any. This dissipates
suspicion, or starts it in so many directions that justice is at once
confused, if not ultimately baffled. Look at that house yonder," the
stranger pursued, pointing to a plain dwelling on the opposite corner.
"While we have been standing here, several persons of one kind or
another, and among them a pretty rough-looking tramp, have gone into the
side gate and so around to the kitchen door and back. I don't know who
lives there, but say it is a solitary old woman above keeping help, and
that an hour from now some one, not finding her in the house, searches
through the garden and comes upon her lying dead behind the wood-pile,
struck down by her own axe. On whom are you going to lay your hand in
suspicion? On the stranger, of course--the rough-looking tramp that
everybody thinks is ready for bloodshed at the least provocation. But
suspicion is not conviction, and I would dare wager that no court, in
face of a persistent denial on his part that he even saw the old woman
when he went to her door, would bring in a verdict of murder against
him, even though silver from her private drawer were found concealed
upon his person. The chance that he spoke the truth, and that she was
not in the house when he entered, and that his crime had been merely one
of burglary or theft, would be enough to save him from the hangman."

"That is true," assented Mr. Lord, "unless all the other persons who had
been seen to go into the yard were not only reputable men, but were
willing to testify to having seen the woman alive up to the time he
invaded her premises."

But the hump-backed stranger had already lounged away.

"What do you think about this, Mr. Byrd?" inquired the District
Attorney, turning to the young man before alluded to. "You are an expert
in these matters, or ought to be. What would you give for the tramp's
chances if the detectives took him in hand?"

"I, sir?" was the response. "I am so comparatively young and
inexperienced in such affairs, that I scarcely dare presume to express
an opinion. But I have heard it said by Mr. Gryce, who you know stands
foremost among the detectives of New York, that the only case of murder
in which he utterly failed to get any clue to work upon, was that of a
Jew who was knocked down in his own shop in broad daylight. But this
will not appear so strange when