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By Root 407 0

box that looked as though it had been laid there specially. A mattress box. Sheriff said, 'Look here, Wendle.' What he was pointing at was a blood-stained footprint. On the mattress box. A half-sole footprint with circles - two holes in the center like a pair of eyes. Then one of us - Mr. Ewalt? I don't recall - pointed out something else. A thing I can't get out of my mind. There was a steam pipe overhead, and knotted to it, dangling from it, was a piece of cord - the kind of cord the killer had used. Obviously, at some point Mr. Clutter had been tied there, strung up by his hands, and then cut down. But why? To torture him? I don't guess we'll never know. Ever know who did it, or why, or what went on in that house that night.

"After a bit, the house began to fill up. Ambulances arrived, and the coroner, and the Methodist minister, a police photographer, state troopers, fellows from the radio and the newspaper. Oh, a bunch. Most of them had been called out of church, and acted as though they were still there. Very quiet. Whispery. It was like nobody could believe it. A state trooper asked me did I have any official business there, and said if not, then I'd better leave. Outside, on the lawn, I saw the undersheriff talking to a man - Alfred Stoecklein, the hired man. Seems Stoecklein lived not a hundred yards from the Clutter house, with nothing between his place and theirs except a barn. But he was saying as to how he hadn't heard a sound - said, 'I didn't know a thing about it till five minutes ago, when one of my kids come running in and told us the sheriff was here. The Missis and me, we didn't sleep two hours last night, was up and down the whole time, on account of we got a sick baby. But the only thing we heard, about ten-thirty, quarter to eleven, I heard a car drive away, and I made the remark to Missis, "There goes Bob Rupp." ' I started walking home, and on the way, about halfway down the lane, I saw Kenyon's old collie and that dog was scared. Stood there with its tail between its legs, didn't bark or move. And seeing the dog - somehow that made me feel again. I'd been too dazed, too numb, to feel the full viciousness of it. The suffering. The horror. They were dead. A whole family. Gentle, kindly people, people I knew - murdered. You had to believe it, because it was really true."

Eight non-stop passenger trains hurry through Holcomb every twenty-four hours. Of these, two pick up and deposit mail - an operation that, as the person in charge of it fervently explains, has its tricky side. "Yessir, you've got to keep on your toes. Them trains come through here, sometimes they're going a hundred miles an hour. The breeze alone, why, it's enough to knock you down. And when those mail sacks come flying out - sakes alive! It's like playing tackle on a football team: Wham! Wham! WHAM! Not that I'm complaining, mind you. It's honest work, government work, and it keeps me young." Holcomb's mail messenger, Mrs. Sadie Truitt - or Mother Truitt, as the townspeople call her - does seem younger than her years, which amount to seventy-five. A stocky, weathered widow who wears babushka bandannas and cowboy boots ("Most comfortable things you can put on your feet, soft as a loon feather"), Mother Truitt is the oldest native-born Holcombite. "Time was wasn't anybody here wasn't my kin. Them days, we called this place Sherlock. Then along came this stranger. By the name Holcomb. A hog raiser, he was. Made money, and decided the town ought to be called after him. Soon as it was, what did he do? Sold out. Moved to California. Not us. I was born here, my children was born here. And! Here! We! Are!" One of her children is Mrs. Myrtle Clare, who happens to be the local postmistress. "Only, don't go thinking that's how I got this position with the government. Myrt didn't even want me to have it. But it's a job you bid for. Goes to whoever puts in the lowest bid. And I always do - so low a caterpillar could peek over it. Ha-ha! That sure does rile the boys. Lots of boys would like to be mail messenger, yessir. But I don't know how much