VIII + 

The district attorney ate up the rest of his thumb nails. + 

The sheriff had the bewildered look of a child who had held a balloon in his hand, had heard a pop, and couldn’t understand where the balloon had gone. + 

I pretended I was perfectly satisfied. + 

“Now we’re back where we started,” the district attorney wailed disagreeably, as if it was everybody’s fault but his, “and with all those weeks wasted.” + 

The sheriff didn’t look at the district attorney, and didn’t say anything. + 

I said: + 

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. We’ve made some progress.” + 

“What?” + 

“We know that Sherry and the dinge have alibis.” + 

The district attorney seemed to think I was trying to kid him. I didn’t pay any attention to the faces he made at me, and asked: + 

“What are you going to do with them?” + 

“What can I do with them but turn them loose? This shoots the case to hell.” + 

“It doesn’t cost the county much to feed them,” I suggested. “Why not hang on to them as long as you can, while we think it over? Something new may turn up, and you can always drop the case if nothing does. You don’t think they’re innocent, do you?” + 

He gave me a look that was heavy and sour with pity for my stupidity. + 

“They’re guilty as hell, but what good’s that to me if I can’t get a conviction? And what’s the good of saying I’ll hold them? Damn it, man, you know as well as I do that all they’ve got to do now is ask for their release and any judge will hand it to them.” + 

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll bet you the best hat in San Francisco that they don’t ask for it.” + 

“What do you mean?” + 

“They want to stand trial,” I said, “or they’d have sprung that alibi before we dug it up. I’ve an idea that they tipped off the Spokane police themselves. And I’ll bet you that hat that you get no habeas corpus motions out of Schaeffer.” + 

The district attorney peered suspiciously into my eyes. + 

“Do you know something that you’re holding back?” he demanded. + 

“No, but you’ll see I’m right.” + 

I was right. Schaeffer went around smiling to himself and making no attempt to get his clients out of the county prison. + 

Three days later something new turned up. + 

A man named Archibald Weeks, who had a small chicken farm some ten miles south of the Kavalov place, came to see the district attorney. Weeks said he had seen Sherry on his⁠—Weeks’s⁠—place early on the morning of the murder. + 

Weeks had been leaving for Iowa that morning to visit his parents. He had got up early to see that everything was in order before driving twenty miles to catch an early morning train. + 

At somewhere between half-past five and six o’clock he had gone to the shed where he kept his car, to see if it held enough gasoline for the trip. + 

A man ran out of the shed, vaulted the fence, and dashed away down the road. Weeks chased him for a short distance, but the other was too speedy for him. The man was too well-dressed for a hobo: Weeks supposed he had been trying to steal the car. + 

Since Weeks’s trip east was a necessary one, and during his absence his wife would have only their two sons⁠—one seventeen, one fifteen⁠—there with her, he had thought it wisest not to frighten her by saying anything about the man he had surprised in the shed. + 

He had returned from Iowa the day before his appearance in the district attorney’s office, and after hearing the details of the Kavalov murder, and seeing Sherry’s picture in the papers, had recognized him as the man he had chased. + 

We showed him Sherry in person. He said Sherry was the man. Sherry said nothing. + 

With Weeks’s evidence to refute the San Pedro police’s, the district attorney let the case against Sherry come to trial. Marcus was held as a material witness, but there was nothing to weaken his San Pedro alibi, so he was not tried. + 

Weeks told his story straight and simply on the witness stand, and then, under cross-examination, blew up with a loud bang. He went to pieces completely. + 

He wasn’t, he admitted in answer to Schaeffer’s questions, quite as sure that Sherry was the man as he had been before. The man had certainly, the little he had seen of him, looked something like Sherry, but perhaps he had been a little hasty in saying positively that it was Sherry. He wasn’t, now that he had had time to think it over, really sure that he had actually got a good look at the man’s face in the dim morning light. Finally, all that Weeks would swear to was that he had seen a man who had seemed to look a little bit like Sherry. + 

It was funny as hell. + 

The district attorney, having no nails left, nibbled his finger-bones. + 

The jury said, “Not guilty.” + 

Sherry was freed, forever in the clear so far as the Kavalov murder was concerned, no matter what might come to light later. + 

Marcus was released. + 

The district attorney wouldn’t say goodbye to me when I left for San Francisco. + 