Arson Plus | Page 3

have been there when
the fire started except the man who had died. We went around to the Allis Employment

Bureau and talked to the manager.
He told us that the Coonses had come into his office on June second, looking for work;
and had given Mrs. Edward Comerford, 45 Woodmansee Terrace, Seattle, Washington,
as reference. In reply to a letter -- he always checked up the references of servants -- Mrs.
Comerford had written that the Coonses had been in her employ for a number of years,
and had been "extremely satisfactory in every respect." On June thirteenth, Thornburgh
had telephoned the bureau, asking that a man and his wife be sent out to keep house for
him, and Allis sent out two couples he had listed. Neither couple had been employed by
Thornburgh, though Allis considered them more desirable than the Coonses, who were
finally hired by Thornburgh.
All that would certainly seem to indicate that the Coonses hadn't deliberately maneuvered
themselves into the place, unless they were the luckiest people in the world -- and a
detective can't afford to believe in luck or coincidence, unless he has unquestionable
proof of it.
At the office of the real-estate agents, through whom Thornburgh had bought the house --
Newning & Weed -- we were told that Thornburgh had come in on the eleventh of June,
and had said that he had been told that the house was for sale, had looked it over, and
wanted to know the price. The deal had been closed the next morning, and he had paid
for the house with a check for $14,500 on the Seamen's Bank of San Francisco. The
house was already furnished.
After luncheon, McClump and I called on Howard Henderson -- the man who had seen
the fire while driving home from Wayton. He had an office in the Empire Building, with
his name and the title Northern California Agent for Krispy Korn Krumbs on the door.
He was a big, careless-looking man of forty-five or so, with the professionally jovial
smile that belongs to the traveling salesman.
He had been in Wayton on business the day of the fire, he said, and had stayed there until
rather late, going to dinner and afterward playing pool with a grocer named
Hammersmith -- one of his customers. He had left Wayton in his machine, at about ten
thirty, and set out for Sacramento. At lavender he had stopped at the garage for oil and
gas, and to have one of his tires blown up.
Just as he was about to leave the garage, the garage man had called his attention to a red
glare in the sky, and had told him that it was probably from a fire somewhere along the
old county road that paralleled the state road into Sacramento; so Henderson had taken
the county road, and had arrived at the burning house just in time to see Thornburgh try
to fight his way through the flames that enveloped him.
It was too late to make any attempt to put out the fire, and the man upstairs was beyond
saving by then -- undoubtedly dead even before the roof collapsed; so Henderson had
helped Coons revive his wife, and stayed there watching the fire until it had burned itself
out. He had seen no one on that county road while driving to the fire. . . .
"What do you know about Henderson?" I asked McClump, when we were on the street.

"Came here, from somewhere in the East, I think, early in the summer to open that
breakfast-cereal agency. Lives at the Garden Hotel. Where do we go next?"
"We get a car, and take a look at what's left of the Thornburgh house."
An enterprising incendiary couldn't have found a lovelier spot in which to turn himself
loose, if he looked the whole county over. Tree-topped hills hid it from the rest of the
world, on three sides; while away from the fourth, an uninhabited plain rolled down to
the river. The county road that passed the front gate was shunned by automobiles, so
McClump said, in favor of the state highway to the north.
Where the house had been was now a mound of blackened ruins. We poked around in the
ashes for a few minutes -- not that we expected to find anything, but because it's the
nature of man to poke around in ruins.
A garage in the rear, whose interior gave no evidence of recent occupation, had a badly
scorched roof and front, but was otherwise undamaged. A shed behind it, sheltering an ax,
a shovel, and various odds and ends of gardening tools, had escaped the fire altogether.
The lawn in front of the house, and the garden behind the shed --