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As if through the silence of a tomb they went to their stations while eleven pairs of black Sicilian eyes searched their downcast features for a sign. Larubio, the cobbler, was paper-white above his smoky beard; Di Marco's swarthy face was green, like that of a corpse; his companions were frozen in various attitudes of eager, dreadful waiting.
Larubio, as he crouched there in the half-light, manacled but defiant, made a striking figure. He was a patriarchal man. His hairy, naked chest rose and fell as he fought for his breath, a thick beard grew high upon his cheeks, lending dignity to his fierce aquiline features, a tangled mass of iron-gray hair hung low above his eyes.
But we won't stop there. We're on a trail that leads higher up, to the man, or men, who directed Larubio and the others to do their work." Maruffi shook his head mournfully. "And the Cressi boy it was you who found him?" "It was." "How did you do it?" Norvin laughed. "If you'd only enlist in the cause I'd tell you all my secrets gladly." "Eh! Then he was betrayed!"
For a moment he stood listening to their talk, and then, at the first pause, interposed without ceremony: "Tell me what is being done?" O'Neil, who had not seemed to note his approach, answered without a hint of surprise at the interruption: "We are dragging the city." "Of course. Have you arrested Larubio, the cobbler?" "No!" Both men turned to Blake now with concentrated attention.
Having seen the body of the Chief ripped and torn in twenty places by buckshot, slugs, and scraps of iron, he had tried to imagine what sort of firearms had been used. Now he knew, and he began to wonder whether death would come to him in the same ugly form. "Have you sent for Larubio?" he asked. "The men are just leaving." "I'll go with them."
And the New Orleans police seemed likely to accomplish little more than the Italian soldiers. Although more than a hundred arrests were made, it was doubtful if, with the exception of Larubio and Cressi, any of the real culprits had been caught. He turned the matter over in his mind incessantly, consulted with O'Neil as to ways and means, conferred with the Mayor, sounded his friends.
"The men who really killed Chief Donnelly," it read, "are Salvatore di Marco, Frank Garcia, Giordano Bolla, and Lorenzo Cardoni." Blake gasped; these were men of standing and repute in the foreign community. "Larubio and his companions were but parts of the machine; these are the hands which set them in motion.
And this, he knew, was not enough to convict even Larubio and his brother-in-law. While thus baffled and groping for the faintest clue, he received a letter which brought him at least a ray of sunshine. He had opened perhaps half of his morning's mail one day when he came upon a truly remarkable missive.
"What has he told, so far?" "Much that is significant, little that is definite. We have pieced his words together, bit by bit, and uncovered his life an inch at a time. It was he who paid the blood money to di Marco and Bolla thousand dollars." "A thousand dollars for the life of Dan Donnelly!" The Countess lowered her yellow head. "They in turn hired Larubio, Normando, and the rest.
Then men went up and poked among the bodies with the hot muzzles of their rifles, turning the corpses over for identification; and as each stark face was recognized a name went echoing out through the dingy corridors to the mob beyond. Larubio, the cobbler, had attempted a daring ruse.
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