I have said before that I do not know anything about the law. I
believe that the Ladley case was unusual, in several ways. Mr. Ladley
had once been well known in New York among the people who frequent the
theaters, and Jennie Brice was even better known. A good many lawyers,
I believe, said that the police had not a leg to stand on, and I know
the case was watched with much interest by the legal profession.
People wrote letters to the newspapers, protesting against Mr. Ladley
being held. And I believe that the district attorney, in taking him
before the grand jury, hardly hoped to make a case.
But he did, to his own surprise, I fancy, and the trial was set for
May. But in the meantime, many curious things happened.
In the first place, the week following Mr. Ladley's arrest my house
was filled up with eight or ten members of a company from the Gaiety
Theater, very cheerful and jolly, and well behaved. Three men, I
think, and the rest girls. One of the men was named Bellows, John
Bellows, and it turned out that he had known Jennie Brice very well.
From the moment he learned that, Mr. Holcombe hardly left him. He
walked to the theater with him and waited to walk home again. He took
him out to restaurants and for long street-car rides in the mornings,
and on the last night of their stay, Saturday, they got gloriously
drunk together--Mr. Holcombe, no doubt, in his character of
Ladley--and came reeling in at three in the morning, singing. Mr.
Holcombe was very sick the next day, but by Monday he was all right,
and he called me into the room.
"We've got him, Mrs. Pitman," he said, looking mottled but cheerful.
"As sure as God made little fishes, we've got him." That was all he
would say, however. It seemed he was going to New York, and might be
gone for a month. "I've no family," he said, "and enough money to keep
me. If I find my relaxation in hunting down criminals, it's a harmless
and cheap amusement, and--it's my own business."
He went away that night, and I must admit I missed him. I rented the
parlor bedroom the next day to a school-teacher, and I found the
periscope affair very handy. I could see just how much gas she used;
and although the notice on each door forbids cooking and washing in
rooms, I found she was doing both: making coffee and boiling an egg
in the morning, and rubbing out stockings and handkerchiefs in her
wash-bowl. I'd much rather have men as boarders than women. The women
are always lighting alcohol lamps on the bureau, and wanting the bed
turned into a cozy corner so they can see their gentlemen friends in
their rooms.
Well, with Mr. Holcombe gone, and Mr. Reynolds busy all day and half
the night getting out the summer silks and preparing for remnant day,
and with Mr. Ladley in jail and Lida out of the city--for I saw in
the papers that she was not well, and her mother had taken her to
Bermuda--I had a good bit of time on my hands. And so I got in the
habit of thinking things over, and trying to draw conclusions, as I
had seen Mr. Holcombe do. I would sit down and write things out as
they had happened, and study them over, and especially I worried over
how we could have found a slip of paper in Mr. Ladley's room with a
list, almost exact, of the things we had discovered there. I used to
read it over, "rope, knife, shoe, towel, Horn--" and get more and more
bewildered. "Horn"--might have been a town, or it might not have been.
There _was_ such a town, according to Mr. Graves, but apparently he
had made nothing of it. _Was_ it a town that was meant?
The dictionary gave only a few words beginning with "horn"--hornet,
hornblende, hornpipe, and horny--none of which was of any assistance.
And then one morning I happened to see in the personal column of one
of the newspapers that a woman named Eliza Shaeffer, of Horner, had
day-old Buff Orpington and Plymouth Rock chicks for sale, and it
started me to puzzling again. Perhaps it had been Horner, and possibly
this very Eliza Shaeffer--
I suppose my lack of experience was in my favor, for, after all, Eliza
Shaeffer is a common enough name, and the "Horn" might have stood for
"hornswoggle," for all I knew. The story of the man who thought of
what he would do if he were a horse, came back to me, and for an hour
or so I tried to think I was Jennie Brice, trying to get away and hide
from my rascal of a husband. But I made no headway. I would never have
gone to Horner, or to any small town, if I had wanted to hide. I
think I should have gone around the corner and taken a room in my own
neighborhood, or have lost myself in some large city.
It was that same day that, since I did not go to Horner, Horner came
to me. The bell rang about three o'clock, and I answered it myself.
For, with times hard and only two or three roomers all winter, I had
not had a servant, except Terry to do odd jobs, for some months.
There stood a fresh-faced young girl, with a covered basket in her
hand.
"Are you Mrs. Pitman?" she asked.
"I don't need anything to-day," I said, trying to shut the door. And
at that minute something in the basket cheeped. Young women selling
poultry are not common in our neighborhood. "What have you there?" I
asked more agreeably.
"Chicks, day-old chicks, but I'm not trying to sell you any. I--may I
come in?"
It was dawning on me then that perhaps this was Eliza Shaeffer. I led
her back to the dining-room, with Peter sniffing at the basket.
"My name is Shaeffer," she said. "I've seen your name in the papers,
and I believe I know something about Jennie Brice."
Eliza Shaeffer's story was curious. She said that she was postmistress
at Horner, and lived with her mother on a farm a mile out of the town,
driving in and out each day in a buggy.
On Monday afternoon, March the fifth, a woman had alighted at the
station from a train, and had taken luncheon at the hotel. She
told the clerk she was on the road, selling corsets, and was much
disappointed to find no store of any size in the town. The woman, who
had registered as Mrs. Jane Bellows, said she was tired and would like
to rest for a day or two on a farm. She was told to see Eliza Shaeffer
at the post-office, and, as a result, drove out with her to the farm
after the last mail came in that evening.
Asked to describe her--she was over medium height, light-haired, quick
in her movements, and wore a black and white striped dress with a red
collar, and a hat to match. She carried a small brown valise that Miss
Shaeffer presumed contained her samples.
Mrs. Shaeffer had made her welcome, although they did not usually take
boarders until June. She had not eaten much supper, and that night she
had asked for pen and ink, and had written a letter. The letter was
not mailed until Wednesday. All of Tuesday Mrs. Bellows had spent in
her room, and Mrs. Shaeffer had driven to the village in the afternoon
with word that she had been crying all day, and bought some headache
medicine for her.
On Wednesday morning, however, she had appeared at breakfast, eaten
heartily, and had asked Miss Shaeffer to take her letter to the
post-office. It was addressed to Mr. Ellis Howell, in care of a
Pittsburgh newspaper!
That night when Miss Eliza went home, about half past eight, the woman
was gone. She had paid for her room and had been driven as far as
Thornville, where all trace of her had been lost. On account of the
disappearance of Jennie Brice being published shortly after that, she
and her mother had driven to Thornville, but the station agent there
was surly as well as stupid. They had learned nothing about the woman.
Since that time, three men had made inquiries about the woman in
question. One had a pointed Vandyke beard; the second, from the
description, I fancied must have been Mr. Graves. The third without
doubt was Mr. Howell. Eliza Shaeffer said that this last man had
seemed half frantic. I brought her a photograph of Jennie Brice as
"Topsy" and another one as "Juliet". She said there was a resemblance,
but that it ended there. But of course, as Mr. Graves had said, by the
time an actress gets her photograph retouched to suit her, it doesn't
particularly resemble her. And unless I had known Jennie Brice myself,
I should hardly have recognized the pictures.
Well, in spite of all that, there seemed no doubt that Jennie Brice
had been living three days after her disappearance, and that would
clear Mr. Ladley. But what had Mr. Howell to do with it all? Why had
he not told the police of the letter from Horner? Or about the woman
on the bridge? Why had Mr. Bronson, who was likely the man with the
pointed beard, said nothing about having traced Jennie Brice to
Horner?
I did as I thought Mr. Holcombe would have wished me to do. I wrote
down on a clean sheet of note-paper all that Eliza Shaeffer said: the
description of the black and white dress, the woman's height, and the
rest, and then I took her to the court-house, chicks and all, and she
told her story there to one of the assistant district attorneys.
The young man was interested, but not convinced. He had her story
taken down, and she signed it. He was smiling as he bowed us out. I
turned in the doorway.
"This will free Mr. Ladley, I suppose?" I asked.
"Not just yet," he said pleasantly. "This makes just eleven places
where Jennie Brice spent the first three days after her death."
"But I can positively identify the dress."
"My good woman, that dress has been described, to the last stilted
arch and Colonial volute, in every newspaper in the United States!"
That evening the newspapers announced that during a conference at the
jail between Mr. Ladley and James Bronson, business manager at the
Liberty Theater, Mr. Ladley had attacked Mr. Bronson with a chair, and
almost brained him.