It was therefore scarcely likely that he kept notes of the articles he wrote about Van Torp.
But his employer did not know that Feist's memory was failing from drink, and that he no longer trusted his marvellous faculty.

Van Torp had sequestrated him and shut him up, Bamberger believed; but neither Van Torp nor any one else would get anything out of him.
And if any one made him talk, what great harm would be done, after all?
It was not to be supposed that such a man as Isidore Bamberger had trusted only to his own keenness in collecting evidence, or to a few pencilled notes as a substitute for the principal witness himself, when an accident might happen at any moment to a man who led such a life.

The case for the prosecution had been quietly prepared during several months past, and the evidence that was to send Rufus Van Torp to execution, or to an asylum for the Criminal Insane for life, was in the safe of Isidore Bamberger's lawyer in New York, unless, at that very moment, it was already in the hands of the Public Prosecutor.

A couple of cables would do the rest at any time, and in a few hours.
In murder cases, the extradition treaty works as smoothly as the telegraph itself.

The American authorities would apply to the English Home Secretary, the order would go to Scotland Yard, and Van Torp would be arrested immediately and taken home by the first steamer, to be tried in New York.
Six months earlier he might have pleaded insanity with a possible chance, but in the present state of feeling the plea would hardly be admitted.