Matthew Broffin had been two weeks and half of a third an unobtrusive spy upon the collective activities of the Wahaskan social group which included the Farnhams before he decided that nothing more could be gained by further delay.

By this time he knew all there was to be known about Miss Farnham; the houses she visited, the somewhat limited circle of her intimates and the vastly wider one of her acquaintances, her comings and goings in the town, her preference for church dissipations over the other sort, and for croquet over lawn tennis.

Also, he had a more minute knowledge which would have terrified her if she had suspected that any strange man was keeping an accurately tabulated note-book record of her waking employments. He knew at what hour she breakfasted, what time in the forenoons she spent upon her Chautauqua readings, how much of her day was given to the care of her invalid aunt, and, most important item of all, how, in the afternoons, when her father was at his town office and the invalid was taking a nap in her room, Miss Charlotte was usually alone in the living-rooms of the two-storied house in Lake Boulevard: practically so for four days out of the seven; actually so on Wednesdays and Fridays when Hilda Larsen, the Swedish maid of all work, had her afternoons off.

Having his own private superstition about Friday, Broffin chose a Wednesday afternoon for his call at the house on the lake front. It was a resplendent day of the early summer which, in the Minnesota latitudes, springs, Minerva-like, full-grown from the nodding head of the wintry Jove of the north. In the doctor's front yard the grass was vividly green, gladioli and jonquils bordered the path with a bravery of color, and the buds of the clambering rose on the porch trellis were swelling to burst their calyxes.

Broffin turned in from the sidewalk and closed the gate noiselessly behind him. If he saw the bravery of colors in the path borders it was only with the outward eye. There was a faint stir on the porch, as of some one parting the leafy screen to look out, but he neither quickened his pace nor slowed it. While he had been three doors away in the lake-fronting street, a small pocket binocular had assured him that the young woman he was going to call upon was sitting in a porch rocker behind the clambering rose, reading a book.

She had risen to meet him by the time he had mounted the steps, and he knew that her first glance was appraisive. He had confidently counted upon being mistaken for a strange patient in search of the doctor, and he was not disappointed.

"You are looking for Doctor Farnham?" she began. "He is at his office—201 Main Street."

Broffin was digging in his pocket for a card. It was not often that he was constrained to introduce himself formally, and for an awkward second or two the search was unrewarded. When he finally found the bit of pasteboard he was explaining verbally.

"I know well enough where your father's office is, but you are the one I wanted to see," he said; and he gave her the round-cornered card with its blazonment of his name and employment.

He was watching her narrowly when she read the name and its underline, and the quick indrawing of the breath and the little shudder that went with it were not thrown away upon him. But the other signs; the pressing of the even teeth upon the lower lip and the coming and going of three straight lines between the half-closed eyes were not so favorable.

"Will you come into the house, Mr.——" she had to look at the card again to get the name—"Mr. Broffin?" she asked.

"Thank you, Miss; it's plenty good enough out here for me if it is for you," he returned, beginning to fear that the common civilities were giving her time to get behind her defences.

She made way for him on the porch and pointed to a chair, which he took, damning himself morosely when he caught his foot in the porch rug and knocked the book from its resting-place on the railing.

"It is no matter," she said, when he would have gone outside to recover the book; but he knew from that moment that whatever advantage a fair beginning may give was gone beyond recall.

"I guess we can take it for granted that you know what I want, Miss Farnham," he began abruptly, when he had shifted his chair to face her rocker. "Something like three months ago, or thereabouts, you went into a bank in New Orleans to get a draft cashed. While you were at the paying teller's window a robbery was committed, and you saw it done and saw the man that did it. I've come to get you to tell me the man's name."

If he had thought to carry the defences by direct assault he was quickly made to realize that it could not be done. Miss Farnham's self-possession was quietly convincing when she said:

"I have told it once, in a letter to Mr. Galbraith."

Broffin nodded. "Yes; in a letter that you didn't sign: we'll come to that a little later. The name you gave was John Wesley Gavitt, and you knew that wasn't his right name, didn't you?"

She made the sign of assent without thinking that it might imply the knowing of more.

"It was the name under which he was enrolled in the Belle Julie's crew, and it was sufficient to identify him," she countered; adding: "It did identify him. The officers found him and arrested him at St. Louis."

"Yes; and he made his get-away in about fifteen minutes after they had nabbed him, as you probably read in the papers the next morning. He's loose yet, and most naturally he ain't signing his name 'Gavitt' any more whatever. I've come all the way from New Orleans, and a whole heap farther, to get you to tell me his real name, Miss Farnham."

"Why do you think I can tell you?" was the undisturbed query.

"A lot of little things," said the detective, who was slowly coming to his own in the matter of self-assurance. "In the first place, he spoke to you in the bank, and you answered him. Isn't that so?"

She nodded, but the firm lips remained closed where the lips of another woman might have opened to repeat what had been said at the teller's wicket.

"Then, afterwards, on the boat, before you sent the letter, you talked with him. It was one evening, just at dusk, on the starboard promenade of the saloon-deck: he was comin' down from the pilot-house and you stopped him. That was when he told you what his name was on the steamboat's books, wasn't it?—what?"

She nodded again. "You know so much, it is surprising that you don't know it all, Mr. Broffin," she commented, with gentle sarcasm.

"The one thing I don't know is the thing you're goin' to tell me—his real name," he insisted. "That's what I've come here for."

In spite of her inexperience, which, in Mr. Broffin's field, was no less than total, Charlotte Farnham had imagination, and with it a womanly zest for the matching of wits with a man whose chief occupation was the measuring of his own wit against the subtle cleverness of criminals. Therefore she accepted the challenge.

"I did my whole duty at the time, Mr. Broffin," she demurred, with a touch of coldness in her voice. "If you were careless enough to let him escape you at St. Louis, you shouldn't come to me. I might say very justly that it was never any affair of mine."

Matthew Broffin's gifts were subtle only in his dealings with other men; but he was shrewd enough to know that his last and best chance with a woman lay in an appeal to her fears.

"I don't know what made you write this letter, in the first place," he said, taking the well-thumbed paper from his coat pocket; "but I know well enough now why you didn't sign it, and why you didn't put the man's real name in it. You—you and him—fixed it up between you so that you could say to yourself afterwards what you've just said to me—that you'd done your duty. But you haven't finished doin' your duty, yet. The law says——"

"I know very well what the law says," was her baffling rejoinder; "I have taken the trouble to find out since I came home. I am not hiding your criminal."

Broffin was trying to gain a little ease by tilting his chair. But the house wall was too close behind him.

"People will say that you are helpin' to hide him as long as you won't tell his real name—what?" he grated.

"You still think I could tell you that, if I chose?" she said, wilfully misleading him, or at least allowing him to mislead himself.

"I don't think anything about it: I know! You'd met him somewhere before that day in the bank—before you knew he was goin' to turn gentleman hold-up. That's why you don't want to give up his real name."

She had risen in answer to the distant chatter of an electric bell, and in self-defence, Broffin had to grope on the floor for his hat and stand up, too.

"I think my aunt is calling and I shall have to go in," she said, calmly dismissing him. "You'll excuse me, I am sure, Mr. Broffin."

"In just one second, Miss Farnham. Ain't you goin' to tell me that fellow's name?"

"No."

"Wait a minute. I'm an officer of the law, and I could arrest you and take you to New Orleans on what evidence I've got. How about that?—what?"

There was good fighting blood on the Farnham side, notwithstanding the kindly Doctor Bertie's peaceful avocation, and the calm gray eyes that met Broffin's were militantly angry when the retort came.

"If I had a brother, Mr. Broffin, he would be able to answer you better than I can!" she flamed out. "Let me pass, please!"

It was not often that Broffin lost his head or his temper, but both were gone when he struck back.

"That'll be all right, too!" he broke out harshly, blocking the way to force her to listen to him. "You think you've bluffed me, don't you?—what? Let me tell you: some fine day this duck whose name isn't Gavitt will turn up here—to see you; then I'll nab him. If you find out where he is, and write to him not to come, it'll be all the same; he'll come anyway, and when he does come, I'll get him!"

When Miss Farnham had gone in and there was nothing left for him to do but to compass his own disappearance, Broffin went away, telling himself with many embellishments that for once in his professional career he had made an ass of himself. He had made a sorry botch of a measurably simple detail, to say nothing of letting his temper push him into the final foolish boast which might easily defeat him.

None the less, he was able to set some few gains over against the one critical loss—if one may be said to lose what he has never had. Failing to learn the true name and place of the Bayou State Security robber, he told himself that he had established beyond question the correctness of his hypothesis. The doctor's daughter knew the man; she had known him before the robbery; she was willing to be his accomplice to the extent of her ability. There was only one explanation of this attitude. In Broffin's wording of it, Miss Farnham was "gone on him," if not openly, at least to such an extent as to make her anxious to shield him.

That being the case, Broffin set it down as a fact as good as accomplished that the man would sooner or later come to Wahaska. The detective's knowledge of masculine human nature was as profoundly acute as the requirements of his calling demanded. With a woman like Miss Farnham for the lure, he could be morally certain that his man would some time fling caution, or even a written prohibition, to the winds, and walk into the trap.

This misfire of Broffin's happened upon a Wednesday, which, in its calendar placing, chanced to be three weeks to a day after Griswold had left Mereside to settle himself studiously in two quiet upper rooms in the Widow Holcomb's house in upper Shawnee Street.

That it was also a day of other coincidences will appear in the casting up of the items on the page of events.

For one thing, it marked the formal opening of the De Soto Inn for the summer season; the De Soto being the resort hotel spoken of by the clerk of the Hotel Chouteau in the little ante-dinner talk which had given Griswold his first outline sketch of Wahaska. For another, the special train from the far South arriving at noon and bearing the first detachment of the Inn's guests, had for one of its Pullman passengers an elderly gentleman with a strongly marked Scottish face; a gentleman with the bushy white eyebrows of age, the long upper lip of caution, the drooping eyelid of irascibility, and the bearing of a man of routine; in other words, Mr. Andrew Galbraith, faring northward on his customary summer vacation, which—the fates intervening—he had this time determined to spend at the Wahaskan resort.

For a third item, it was at three o'clock of this same Wednesday that Raymer came out of Jasper Grierson's bank with his head down and a cloud on his brow; the cloud dating back to an interview just closed, a short and rather brittle conference with the bank's president held in Jasper Grierson's private room, with the president sitting at ease in his huge arm-chair and his visitor standing, quite destitute of ease, at the desk-end.

A little farther along, this third item dovetailed with a fourth and fifth. Raymer, dropping into a friend's office to use the telephone, chanced upon a crossed wire. He had called up Mrs. Holcomb, and while he was waiting for the widow to summon Griswold from his up-stairs den, there was a confused skirling of bells and Raymer, innocently eavesdropping, overheard part of a conversation between two well-known voices; namely, the voices of Miss Charlotte Farnham and her father. The talk was neither confidential, nor of any special significance. Miss Farnham was explaining that she had heard the bell, but could not answer promptly because she had had a caller; and the doctor was telling her that it was no matter—that he merely wanted to let her know that he was going to bring a dinner guest, the guest prospective being his late patient, Mr. Kenneth Griswold.

The mention of Griswold's name reminded Raymer of his own affair, and he became suddenly anxious to have the connection with the Widow Holcomb's house renewed. When the crossed wire was plugged out, Griswold was ready and waiting.

"I was afraid you might be out somewhere, and I want to have a pow-wow with you," said Raymer, when the reassuring voice came over the wire. "Can you give me a little time if I drive around?" And when the prompt assent came: "All right; thank you. I'll be with you in a pair of minutes."

Raymer's horse was only a short half-square away, hitched in front of the Winnebago House, and he went to get it. But at the instant of unhitching, Miss Grierson's trap was driven up and the untying of knots paused while he stepped from the curb to stand at the wheel of the modish equipage.

"You are getting to be as bad as all the others," was the greeting he got from the high driving-seat. "You haven't been at Mereside for an age—only once since the night you took Mr. Griswold away from us. By the way, what has become of Mr. Griswold? He doesn't show himself in public much oftener than you do."

"I think he has been getting to work on his writing," said Raymer, good-naturedly apologizing for his friend. "He'll come down out of the clouds after a little." And then, before he could stop it, out came the bit of unchartered information: "I understand he dines at Doctor Bertie's to-night."

The young iron-founder was looking up into the eyes of beguiling when he said this, and, being a mere man, he wondered what made them flash and then grow suddenly fathomless and brooding.

"When you see him, tell him that we are still on earth over at Mereside," said the magnate's daughter pertly; and a moment later Raymer was free to keep his appointment with Griswold.

All in all, the little interruption had consumed no more than five minutes, but the time interval was sufficient to form another link in the chain of Wednesday incidents. For, as Raymer was turning out of Main Street into Shawnee, he narrowly missed running over a heavy-set man with a dark face and drooping mustaches; a pedestrian whose preoccupation seemed so great as to make him quite oblivious to street crossings and passing vehicles until Raymer pulled his horse back into the shafts and shouted.

When the man looked up, Raymer recognized him as the stranger from the South who was stopping at the Winnebago House and who gave himself out as a Louisiana lumberman open to conviction on the subject of Minnesota pine lands as an investment. But he had no means of knowing that Broffin's momentary preoccupation was chargeable to a fruitless interview lately concluded; or that in driving away to the house three squares up the street he was bridging the narrow gap between a man-hunter and his quarry—a gap which had suddenly grown into a chasm for the man-hunter himself.

One more small coincidence will serve to total the items on the Wednesday page. If Broffin had not stopped to look after the man who had so nearly run him down, he might not have been crossing Main Street in front of the Winnebago at the precise instant when Miss Grierson, with young Dahlgren in the second seat of the trap, came around the square and pulled up to let her horse drink at the public fountain.

"Who is that Bitter-Creekish-looking man crossing over to the Winnebago House?" asked Miss Grierson of her seatmate, indicating Broffin with a wave of the whip, and skilfully making the query sound like the voicing of the idlest curiosity.

"Fellow named Broffin, from Louisiana," said Dahlgren, who, as assistant editor of the Daily Wahaskan, knew everybody. "Says he's in the lumber business down there, but, 'I doubt it,' said the carpenter, and shed a bitter tear."

"Why do you doubt it?" queried Miss Grierson, neatly flicking a fly from the horse's back with the tip of the whiplash.

"Oh, on general principles, I guess. You wouldn't say he had any of the ear-marks of a business man."

"What kind of ear-marks has he got?" persisted Miss Grierson—merely to make talk, as Dahlgren decided.

"I don't know. We were talking about him around at the club the other night, and Sheffield—he's from Kentucky, you know—thought he remembered the name as the name of a 'moonshine' raider he'd heard of down in his home State."

"A moonshine raider? What is that?" By this time Miss Margery's curiosity was less inert than it had been, or had seemed to be, at first.

"A deputy marshal, you know; a sort of Government policeman and detective rolled into one. He looks it, don't you think?"

Miss Grierson did not say what she thought, then, or later, when she set Dahlgren down at the door of his newspaper office in Sioux Avenue. But still later, two hours later, in fact, she gave a brief audience in the Mereside library to a small, barefooted boy whose occupation was sufficiently indicated by the bundle of evening papers hugged under one arm.

"Well, Johnnie; what did you find out?" she asked.

"Ain't had time," said the boy. "But he ain't no milyunaire lumber-shooter, I'll bet a nickel. I sold him a pape' jes' now, down by Dutchie's lumber yard, and I ast him what kind o' lumber that was in the pile by the gate. He didn't know, no more'n a goat."

Miss Margery filliped a coin in the air and the newsboy caught it dexterously.

"That will do nicely for a beginning, Johnnie," she said sweetly. "Come and see me every once in a while, and perhaps there'll be more little white cart-wheels for you. Only don't tell; and don't let him catch you. That's all."