The Saint Paul globe., 1903-07-26

II, Bloomington, ILL.,, two weeks ago
last Thursday night.
Three weeks ago not thousand people
in all the $4,000 population of Bloom
irgton had ever seen or heard of Maude
Jordine. AS to the baby, Mabel what
did one babe more or less amount to in
a family where there had lieen nine
babies within sixteen years? Any
neighbor within five squares of the
home of Andrew Jordine would
shake his head long and slow
ly at the question. But when
somehow States Attorney Fleming at
the preliminary hearing ceased calling
for any more of the twenty-six wit
nesses that had been summoned for
the state to testify against Maude Jor-
dine, and when Attorney Barr for the
defense had stepped over inquiringly to
the side of the prosecutor, who was
looking into the troubled face of former
Detective Press Butler, and when JUS
tice Heinemann left his seat and leaned
over the bench to look still more IN
quiringly down at the whole group
Why, somebody away back in the
room where he could not have heard
ten words of the evidence, clapped his
palms together three times. He was
the quickest, most acute man in all the
crowded court room. In a second more
somebody else in the audience shouted
"Hoo-rayI" And then, against all the
precedeats of the court that had an
nounced no finding, and certainly
against the sober best judgment of
every taxpayer and publicspirited res
ident of Bloomington and Mclean
,4,t; o,,1
women of the city rose in body,
climbed upon the seats and chairs and
ratings and tables of the scarcely fin
ished circuit cort room in the fiIIest
court house in the state of Illinois
climbed and stood and cheered and
cheered; rolled over the splendid ma
hogany rail that separated the specta-
tors from the court, leaving the scars
of nailed heels upon rail and seats and
tables; and there swarmed around a
quiet, almost timid girl with a strange
ly womanly face, who for more than an
hour had sat calmly just in front of
two grim, stalwart deputy sheriffs, with
whom just little while before she ha%
walked around the crowded public
square to freedom.
al Guess You're Loose"
'T guess you're loose" said Deputy
Sheriff Ryan, leaning forward over the
small figure in the immaculate white
shirt waist, the neat black hat with it's
simple band of white, and the pitifully
worn skirt of blue serge.
Still calm, but with look of doubt
ing inquiry in the clear, steady brown
eyes and round, innocent face, the girl
with the woman look got up from her
chair. Then in an avalanche the 700
friends who would not have known her
a fortnight before and more than halt
of whom had been made her friend in
half an hour-700 of them were trying
to reach her hands
'Lawsy me-" burst out a handsome
mulatto woman in a linen suit and who
had come over the railing with the in
cubus of at least 200 pounds of flesh.
She seized the small figure from be-
hind in swift, bearlike hug and in
second had grasped the hand of At
torney Barr
81 said was goin' to shake yo hand
an I've done tan I've hugged that
po' child-an' if you need any moey to
pay you"
mot a cent-not anybody's money"
smiled the attorney, and the look of
disappointment that spread over the
woman's face went to the heart of half
a dozen onloolxers.
Seven hundred excited and jubilant
spectators from the court room crowd
ed out into the upper corridors and
down the crowded stairs and into the
already packed lower corridors. where
another 700 had jammed for an hour,
waiting. But in all this crowding and
milling the slight, short figure of for
mer Detective Press Butler could not
lose itself. and the slight tall figure Of
j. w. Wallace. the chief witness for the
detective, was a mark for every eye;
and as the two came down the marble
stairs they were booted and Kissed
and jostled and tripped, even while it
was recognized by these hundreds of
law-abiding people that the acquittal
of Maude Jordine left unsolved and
without clew the most fiendish murder
that perhaps ever was committed in
Illinois.
Where the Jordines Live.
Three weeks ago if you had asked in
a Bloomington street as to where the
Jordines lived you would have been
suspected of that old malady, the "sim-
pies" You wouldn't have found the
place by the city directory either To-
day everybody in Bloomington having
two good eyes, has seen the place, and
one old lady of pleasant face and man
ner, wearing hopelessly opaque patch
over one eye, went past the house the
other evening showing great interest,
and that she afterwards appeared in
Justice HendryX'S Smothering court,
from which the Jordine case finally
was taken on sudden change of ven
lie.
To direct one to the Jordine home,
however, the visitor must know where
Pone Hollow begins, away to the
southwest of the city and just in the
corner of Stautz's pasture. Out of the
pasture the wet weather brooklet
comes under the fence, crosses Miller
street just where it begins to be road,
and then on the north side of the road
trickles for a hundred yards till it
slowly angles north again, leaving just
room enough for the Jordine house to
face the Miller road and the pasture
beyond and at the same time allow the
back steps of the house to keep their
feet out of the ditch.
Nothing for half a block around is
fenced. The Hollow is shallow behind
the house and there are honey locusts,
and walnut trees, and hickories, and
oaks, the trees growing larger as they
rise out of the deepening, widening
Hollow to the northwest to become
blackened lacework against the red,
and yellow, and finally steel white of
the sunsets and their aftergloW.
The Jordine house has one room and
two doors. There is a cellar, half under
the surface and half formed of a board
Ing nailed to the posts on which the
building sits. There are several win
dow paneS in the house and cellar that
are not broken, but there is not a