The robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank was already an old story when Mr. Matthew Broffin, chief of the New Orleans branch of a notable detective agency, returned from Guatemala with the forger Mortsen as his travelling companion.

Broffin was a successful man in his calling. Beginning as a deputy marshal in the "moonshining" districts of Kentucky and Tennessee, he had shifted first to the Secret Service, and later to the more highly specialized ranks of the private agencies. With nothing very spectacular to his credit, he had earned repute as a follower of long trails, and as an acute unraveller of tangled clews. Hence, his docket was never empty.

It was not altogether for the sake of the reward that he took over the case of the bank robbery a few days after his return from Central America. As a matter of fact, there was an express-company case waiting which promised more money. But emulation counts for something, even in the thief-catching field; and since two members of his own staff had fired and missed their mark in St. Louis, there was a blunder to be retrieved.

Reasoning logically upon the new problem, Broffin did not at once try to take up the chase at the point to which it had been carried by the two who had failed. Since the man had disappeared, the first necessity was the establishing of his true identity, and for a week Broffin devoted himself to the task of disentangling the two personalities: that of the decently dressed, parlor-anarchist bank-raider, and that of the man who figured in the anonymous letter as Gavitt, the deck-hand.

At the end of the week two facts were sufficiently apparent. The first was that there had been a real John Gavitt, a consumptive roustabout on the New Orleans river-front; a person easily traceable up to the time of his disappearance on or about the day of the robbery, and whose description, gathered from those who had known him well, tallied not at all with the best obtainable word-picture of the bank-robber. Fact the second was a corollary of the first: by some means the robber had contrived to change places with Gavitt; to take his place in the Belle Julie's crew and to assume his name.

Broffin called this step in the outworking of his problem an incident closed when he had wired the post-master of the little Iowa river town from which the true Gavitt had migrated, and had received the expected reply. John Wesley Gavitt had reached home two days after the date of the bank robbery, had died within the week, and had been buried beside his wife.

The next step was purely constructive; an attempt to build, upon the description given by President Galbraith and the teller Johnson, a likeness which would fit some notorious "strong-arm man" known to the criminal records and the rogues' galleries. Broffin was not greatly disappointed when the effort failed.

"It's just about as I've been putting it up, all along," he mused, lighting his pipe and filling with a fragrant cloud the cramped little office in which he did his research work. "The fellow ain't a crook; he's an amateur, and this is his first break. That being the lay-out, he's liable to do all the things, the different kinds of things, that a sure-enough 'strong-arm man' wouldn't do."

It was to Bainbridge, sitting at the desk's end and turning the leaves of a rogues'-gallery reprint, that the musing conclusion was directed. The reporter was freshly returned from his jaunt to the banana coast, and he had climbed Broffin's stair to get the story of the Mortsen capture.

"He did one of the different things when he worked his way out of here in a deck crew," suggested Bainbridge. "The real thug wouldn't have done anything so honestly toilsome as that."

"Hardly," Broffin acquiesced. "There was about one chance in a thousand, and on that chance I've been looking for a picture that would fit him. There ain't any."

The reporter was glancing over his notes of the Mortsen story, and he got up to go.

"Well, I'm glad it's your job and not mine," he said, by way of leave-taking. "If your guess is right, it's like looking for the traditional needle in the haystack."

"Ump," said Broffin; and for a good hour after the reporter had gone he sat slowly swinging in the creaking office chair, smoking pipe after pipe and thinking.

At the end of the reflective revery he closed his desk, locked his office, and went once more to the bank. It was the hour of the noon lull, and Johnson, the paying teller, was free to talk.

"I hope I'll get through bothering you, some day, Mr. Johnson," Broffin began. "But when I get stuck, I have to come to you. What Mr. Galbraith don't remember would crowd a dictionary."

The teller made good-natured apologies for his chief. "Mr. Galbraith was a good bit upset, naturally. It was a pretty bad wrench for a man of his age."

"Sure, it was; and he's feeling it yet. That's why I'm letting him alone when I can. Just go once more carefully over the part of it that you saw, won't you?"

Johnson retold the story of the cashing of the president's check, circumstantially, and with the exactness of a man trained in a school of business accuracy.

"You'd make a good witness, Mr. Johnson," was Broffin's comment. "You can tell the same story twice, hand-running, which is more than most folks can do. Would you know the young woman if you'd see her again?"

"Hardly, I think."

"You say she was cashing a draft: how was she identified?"

"She had credentials from her home bank, with her signature attested."

"Of course, she didn't surrender her letter of identification?"

"No; we don't require it when the letter is a general one and not a credit letter."

Broffin pulled thoughtfully at his drooping mustaches. He was rearranging the pieces on the mental chess-board. He had not yet asked either of the questions he had come to ask. Without knowing the science even by name, he was still enough of a psychologist to prepare the way by leading the mind of the witness cleverly over the details of its own memory picture.

"You say the hold-up made way for the lady here at the window: you saw him do it?"

"Yes."

"Did any sign of recognition pass between them—anything to make you think that they might be acquainted with each other?"

This was one of the two critical questions, and the teller took time to consider.

"It's pretty hard to tag that with a definite 'yes' or 'no,'" he said, when the memory-searching moment had passed. "He spoke to her; of that I am quite sure, though I didn't hear what he said. She nodded and smiled. She had a beautiful face, and I remember how it lighted up when he spoke and stepped back."

"Then they might have been acquainted, you think?" Broffin said, adding quickly: "Don't let the fact that she afterward tried to set the dogs on him twist your judgment any. She might have known the man, and still be unwilling, afterward, to shield the criminal."

Again Johnson took time to be accurate.

"I'll admit that my impression at the time was that they were acquainted," he averred, at the end of the ends. "Of course you can't bank much on that. He might have said to a perfect stranger, 'After you,' or whatever it was that he did say; and she would acknowledge the courtesy with the nod and the smile—any well-bred woman would. But you can take it for what it is worth; my thought at the moment was that they had met before; casually, perhaps, as people meet on trains or in hotels; that there was at least recognition on both sides."

Broffin was nodding slowly. It was not often that he made a confidant of a witness, even in the smaller details of a case, but he evidently considered the helpful teller an exception.

"I've been working around to that notion myself, by the smalls, as the cat eat the grind-rock," he said. "I said to myself, Would he, with the big pull-off still trembling on the edge—would he have held back for a woman he didn't know? And if he did know her, it would be a good, chunky reason why he shouldn't crowd in and take his turn: he'd have to make good or lose whatever little ante he'd been putting up in the sociable game. Now one other little thing: you counted him out the single thousand in small bills first, you said: then what happened?"

"Then I went to the vault."

"And when you came back, the young woman was gone?"

"Oh, yes; she went while Mr. Galbraith was handing me his check."

"She left before you started for the vault?"

"Yes."

"You didn't notice whether she said 'Good-by' or 'Thank you,' or anything like that, I reckon?"

"No."

"But she might have, and you not see it?"

"Yes; she might have."

"All right; then we'll go on," Broffin continued, and the time having arrived for the putting of the second critical question, he planted it fairly. "You opened the wicket and passed the money out to the hold-up. He took it and backed to the door—this nearest door. Mr. Galbraith tells me he gave the alarm as quick as he could draw his breath. How much time did the fellow have before somebody went after him?"

Johnson's answer was gratifyingly prompt.

"You might say, no time at all. There were a number of people in the bank—perhaps a dozen or more—standing around waiting their turns at the different wickets. I should say that every single one of them made a rush for the doors, and I remember thinking at the time that the fellow couldn't possibly get away."

"Yet he did get away; made his drop-out so neatly that none of the rushers got to the doors soon enough to catch a sight of him?"

"That is the curious fact. Not a man of them saw him. They all told the same story. The sidewalk wasn't crowded at the time: we are on the sunny side of the street, and as you see now, the crowd is on the other side in the shade. Yet the fellow had vanished before the nimblest one of them got to the doors."

Broffin drew a deep breath and nodded slowly. The added details were fitting the new theory to a nicety. In conversation with the president he had previously marked the fact that the robber had claimed to be starving.

"Thank you, Mr. Johnson; I reckon that's all for this time," he said to the teller, and a minute later he was buying a cigar of the little Gascon proprietor of the restaurant next door to the bank.

"You have an excellent memory, I've been told, Monsieur Pouillard," he said, at the lighting of the cigar. "Do you recollect the day of the bank robbery next door pretty well?"

The Gascon shrugged amiably. "Vraiment, M'sieu' Broffin; it ees not possib' that one forgets."

"It was rather late for breakfast, and not quite late enough for lunch: were you feeding many people just then?"

"H-onlee one; he is yo'ng man w'at don' nevveh come on my 'otel biffo'. He is sit on dat secon' table; oui!"

Broffin pushed the probe of inquiry a little deeper. How did M. Pouillard happen to remember? Mais, it was because the young man was very droll; he was of the cold blood. When Victor, le garÇon, would have brought news of the Émeute, he had said, breakfast first, and the news afterward.

Questioned in his turn, the serving-man corroborated his employer's particulars and was able to add a few of his own. The young man was fair, with blue eyes and a reddish beard and mustaches. The mustaches were untrimmed, but the beard was clipped to a point, À les moeurs des Étudiants des Beaux Arts. The waiter had once served tables in a Paris cafÉ, and he seldom lost an opportunity of advertising the fact. Pressed to account for his accurate memory picture of a chance patron, he confessed naÏvely; the tip had been princely and the young man was one to mark and to remember—and to serve again.

Broffin left the restaurant with one more link in the chain neatly forged. There was an excellent reason why none of the first-aid pursuers had been able to catch a glimpse of the "strong-arm man." He had merely stepped from the bank entrance to Monsieur Pouillard's. Between the cafÉ breakfast and the departure of the Belle Julie there lay an hour and a quarter. In that interval he could easily perfect his simple disguise. Broffin was not specially interested in the incidental minutiÆ. It was the identity of the man with the untrimmed mustaches and the pointed beard that must be established.

After another week of patient groping, Broffin was obliged to confess that the problem of identification was too difficult to be solved on conventional lines. It presented no point of attack. With neither a name nor a pictured face for reference, inquiry was crippled at the very outset. None of the many boarding- and rooming-houses he visited had lost a lodger answering the verbal description of the missing man. Very reluctantly, for bull-dog tenacity was the detective's ruling characteristic, he was forced to the conclusion that the only untried solution lay in Teller Johnson's unfortified impression that the chance meeting at his wicket was not the first meeting between the robber and the young woman with the draft to be cashed.

It was the slenderest of threads, and Broffin realized sweatingly how difficult it might be to follow. Assuming that there had been a previous meeting or meetings, or rather the passing acquaintance which was all that the young woman's later betrayal of the man made conceivable, would the writer of the accusing letter be willing to add to her burden of responsibility by giving the true name and standing of the man whose real identity—if she knew it—she had been careful to conceal in the unsigned note to Mr. Galbraith? Broffin read the note again—"a deck-hand, whose name on the mate's book is John Wesley Gavitt," was the description she had given. It might, or it might not, be an equivocation; but the longer Broffin dwelt upon it the more he leaned toward the conclusion to which his theory and the few known facts pointed. The young woman knew the man in his proper person; she had been reluctant to betray him—that, he decided, was sufficiently proved by the lapse of time intervening between the date of her note and its postmark date; having finally decided to give him up, she had told only what was absolutely necessary, leaving him free to conceal his real name and identity if he would—and could.

Having come thus far on the road to convincement, Broffin knew what he had to do and set about the doing of it methodically. A telegram to the clerk of the Belle Julie served to place the steamer in the lower river; and boarding a night train he planned to reach Vicksburg in time to intercept the witnesses whose evidence would determine roughly how many hundreds or thousands of miles he could safely cut out of the zigzag journeyings to which the following up of the hypothetical clew would lead.

For, cost what it might, he was determined to find the writer of the unsigned letter.