As for ourselves, not one of us knew how the bomb was thrown.  Ernest told me that the fraction of an instant before it exploded he both heard and saw it strike at his feet.  He testified to this at the trial, but no one believed him.  Besides, the whole thing, in popular slang, was “cooked up.”  The Iron Heel had made up its mind to destroy us, and there was no withstanding it.

There is a saying that truth will out.  I have come to doubt that saying.  Nineteen years have elapsed, and despite our untiring efforts, we have failed to find the man who really did throw the bomb.  Undoubtedly he was some emissary of the Iron Heel, but he has escaped detection.  We have never got the slightest clew to his identity.  And now, at this late date, nothing remains but for the affair to take its place among the mysteries of history.*

* Avis Everhard would have had to live for many generations ere she could have seen the clearing up of this particular mystery.  A little less than a hundred years ago, and a little more than six hundred years after the death, the confession of Pervaise was discovered in the secret archives of the Vatican.  It is perhaps well to tell a little something about this obscure document, which, in the main, is of interest to the historian only.

Pervaise was an American, of French descent, who in 1913 A.D., was lying in the Tombs Prison, New York City, awaiting trial for murder.  From his confession we learn that he was not a criminal.  He was warm-blooded, passionate, emotional.  In an insane fit of jealousy he killed his wife—­a very common act in those times.  Pervaise was mastered by the fear of death, all of which is recounted at length in his confession.  To escape death he would have done anything, and the police agents prepared him by assuring him that he could not possibly escape conviction of murder in the first degree when his trial came off.  In those days, murder in the first degree was a capital offense.  The guilty man or woman was placed in a specially constructed death-chair, and, under the supervision of competent physicians, was destroyed by a current of electricity.  This was called electrocution, and it was very popular during that period.  Anaesthesia, as a mode of compulsory death, was not introduced until later.

This man, good at heart but with a ferocious animalism close at the surface of his being, lying in jail and expectant of nothing less than death, was prevailed upon by the agents of the Iron Heel to throw the bomb in the House of Representatives.  In his confession he states explicitly that he was informed that the bomb was to be a feeble thing and that no lives would be lost.  This is directly in line with the fact that the bomb was lightly charged, and that its explosion at Everhard’s feet was not deadly.

Pervaise was smuggled into one of the galleries ostensibly closed for repairs.