have made it a readily merchantable commodity once more, but Ware was averse even to this small overhead chargeable against his profits. Accordingly, he employed an emissary to canvass the smaller funeral supply houses, offering high-grade caskets at prices attractively below the usual wholesale.
One of these traveling salesmen approached the Southern Undertaking Supply & Sales Company, of Jacksonville, and told them a certain Atlanta undertaker was prepared to furnish them a limited number of fine caskets at a price far below that of the manufacturers. So low, indeed, were the prices quoted that the company's secretary became suspicious, and communicated his suspicions to Police Chief Beavers of Atlanta.
Chief Beavers also suspected that all was not as it should be, and detailed two plain-clothes men to investigate these bargain-counter caskets.
South View Cemetery is the principal negro burying ground of Atlanta, and it was here the detectives began their quest. Nothing untoward was apparent. The place presented the usual hodgepodge of expensive monuments and neglected graves common to all negro cemeteries in the South. The wind soughed dolefully through the Lombardy poplars, birds twittered and quarreled in the branches. A pair of negro grave-diggers plied their mournful trade in the unyielding yellow clay.
"We'll just stick around tonight and see what happens," one of the detectives said. The other agreed, and after a cursory inspection of the grave yard and a few formal questions to the grave diggers, the sleuths left.
That night they posted themselves behind the fence, where they could get a full view of several new and flower-decked graves. Toward morning an undertaker's motor casket wagon drove to the cemetery gate, was admitted, and chugged its way to the new section of the grave yard. Three men, armed with maddocks and spades, alighted, carefully removed the floral pieces from a grave and commenced to dig.
Tense with excitement, the detectives saw the trio unearth an expensive casket, tumble the body back into the grave, replace the earth and flowers, then drive off with the burial case for which several hundred dollars had recently been paid.
Drawing their revolvers, the detectives barred the wagon's passage. The occupants attempted to run them down, but the sight of the officers' guns and shields, coupled with the fact they were white men, dampened their ardor for the exploit. They surrendered.
When the officers inspected their catch they found they had taken Samuel F. Ware, president of a prosperous negro undertaking company, and Thurman Jones and Claude Maddox, grave diggers in the cemetery's employ.
A few days after Ware's duplicity became known in Atlanta, the traditional belief that colored people in the South always give cemeteries a wide berth exploded with an impressive bang. Scores of enraged colored residents of the city whose dead had been interred in South View Cemetery, armed with picks, shovels, hoes, rakes—any sort of delving instrument they could find—descended upon the peaceful God's Acre and began a personal investigation of their relatives' graves.
The first grave opened was that of Nancy Joy, one time belle of Auburn Avenue. Her casket was gone. It was found in the next grave to be explored, that of a negro man. Ware had stolen it after burying Nancy and resold it to the man's family. For some reason—perhaps because he had not yet gotten round to it—he had not stolen that particular casket a second time.
As each grave was opened new wailings and moanings arose until it seemed the cemetery was witnessing a gigantic multiple funeral, each part of which was equipped with a large and demonstrative corps of mourners.
For a time it appeared that the cemetery would be bereft of its dead; but after striving futilely to calm the excited negroes, the cemetery authorities sent for the police, who put an abrupt stop to the impromptu investigation.
Ware, Jones and Maddox were indicted by the Fulton county grand jury shortly afterwards, the indictment charging violation of Section 408 of the state penal code, which prescribes a maximum penaly of ten years' imprisonment for the wanton removal of a body from its grave.
A novel defense was outlined, the contention being that the caskets alleged to be stolen were really rented. The suggestion of this remarkable defense, involving the psychology of the "fine funeral" was made by one of the grave diggers arrested with Ware.
"Ware told us," he said, "that he wasn't stealing those caskets. He said he had just rented them to the families so they could make a big show of having a fine funeral. He said his customers had agreed to let him put the bodies in plain boxes afterward, and take back the expensive caskets so he could rent them to other people."
The caskets were removed under cover of darkness, it was explained, so that nobody would know of Ware's arrangement with his patrons.
There was no indication of such an understanding, however, among the negroes who had thronged South View Cemetery when Ware's operations were being unofficially investigated. Neither was there any evidence of rental agreements when his case came on for trial before the petit jury. A verdict of guilty was quickly arrived at, and the miscreant who had betrayed his patrons' trust received a sentence of the extreme penalty provided by the statute—ten years' imprisonment at hard labor.
The Third Article in This Absorbing Series Will Appear in an
Early Issue of WEIRD TALES
