After the coroner’s jury had viewed the body and its surroundings, Wilson suggested a search upstairs, and he went along.  The jury forced an entrance to Tom’s room, but found nothing, of course.

The coroner’s jury found that the homicide was committed by Luigi, and that Angelo was accessory to it.

The town was bitter against the misfortunates, and for the first few days after the murder they were in constant danger of being lynched.  The grand jury presently indicted Luigi for murder in the first degree, and Angelo as accessory before the fact.  The twins were transferred from the city jail to the county prison to await trial.

Wilson examined the finger marks on the knife handle and said to himself, “Neither of the twins made those marks.  Then manifestly there was another person concerned, either in his own interest or as hired assassin.”

But who could it be?  That, he must try to find out.  The safe was not opened, the cashbox was closed, and had three thousand dollars in it.  Then robbery was not the motive, and revenge was.  Where had the murdered man an enemy except Luigi?  There was but that one person in the world with a deep grudge against him.

The mysterious girl!  The girl was a great trial to Wilson.  If the motive had been robbery, the girl might answer; but there wasn’t any girl that would want to take this old man’s life for revenge.  He had no quarrels with girls; he was a gentleman.

Wilson had perfect tracings of 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.