It was on the second day after the pistol-buying incident in Simmons & Kleifurt's that Broffin, wishful for solitude and a chance to think in perspective, took to the woods.

In the moment of lost temper, when he had threatened angrily to play an indefinite waiting game, prolonging it until his man should walk into the trap, nothing had really been farther from his intentions. As a matter of fact, there were the best of business reasons why he should not waste another day in following, or attempting to follow, the cold trail. Other cases were pressing, and his daily mail from the New Orleans head-quarters brought urgings impatient and importunate; and on the third day following the sleeveless interview with the doctor's daughter he had paid his bill at the Winnebago House and had packed his grip for the southward flight by the afternoon train.

Twenty minutes before train-time a telegram from the New Orleans office had reopened the closed and crossed-off account of the Bayou State Security robbery. It was a bare line in answer to his own wire advising the office that he was about to return, but its significance was out of all proportion to its length. "B. S. S. man is in your town. Important letter to-day's mail," was all it said, but that was sufficient. Broffin had promptly told the clerk of the Winnebago that he had changed his mind, and forty-eight hours afterward he had the letter.

Like the telegram, the mail communication was significant but inconclusive. One Patrick Sheehan, a St. Louis cab driver, dying, had made confession to his priest. For a bribe of two hundred dollars he had aided and abetted the escape of a criminal on a day and date corresponding to the mid-April arrival of the steamer Belle Julie at St. Louis. Afterward he had driven the man to an up-town hotel (name not given) and had obtained from the clerk the man's name and destination. In his letter enclosing the confession the priest went on to say that the penitent had evidently had a severe struggle with his conscience. A mistaken sense of gratitude to the man who had bribed him had led him to tear off and destroy the upper half of the card given him by the up-town hotel clerk, and with the reminder gone he could not recall the man's name. But the destination address, "Wahaska, Minnesota," had been preserved, and the torn portion of the card bearing it was submitted with the confession.

With this new clue for an incentive, Broffin had immediately put his nose to the cold trail again. All other things apart, the torn card conclusively proved the correctness of the obstinately maintained hypothesis. If the robber had really chosen Wahaska for his hiding-place, he had done so merely because it was Miss Farnham's home. The boldness of the thing appealed instantly to a like quality in the detective, and he was not entirely unprepared for the eye-opening shock which came when he began to suspect that Griswold, the writing-man, was the man he was looking for.

The premonitory symptoms of the shock had manifested themselves when he began to note the regularity of Griswold's visits to the house in Lake Boulevard. Then came the pistol-buying episode, closely following an investment of money possible only to a capitalist—or a robber. Broffin worked quickly after this, tracing Griswold's record back to its Wahaskan beginnings and shadowing his man so faithfully that at any hour of the day or night he could have clapped the arresting hand upon his shoulder. Still he hesitated. Once, in his Secret Service days, he had arrested the wrong man, and the smart of the prosecution for false imprisonment would rankle as long as he lived.

This was why he took to the woods on the afternoon of the second day following Griswold's pistol purchase. He felt himself growing short-sighted from the very nearness of things. The single necessity now was for absolute and unshakable identification. To establish this, three witnesses, and three only, could be called upon. Of the three, two had failed signally—Miss Farnham because she had her own reasons for blocking the game, and President Galbraith.... That was another chapter in the book of failure. Broffin had learned that the president was stopping at the De Soto Inn, and he had manoeuvred to bring Mr. Galbraith face to face with Griswold in the Grierson bank on the day after the pistol-buying. To his astonishment and disgust the president had shaken his head irritably, adding a rebuke. "Na, na, man; your trade makes ye over-suspeecious. That's Mr. Griswold, the writer-man and a friend of the Griersons. Miss Madgie was telling me about him last week. He's no more like the robber than you are. Haven't I told ye the man was bearded like a tyke?"

With two of the three eye-witnesses refusing to testify, there remained only Johnson, the paying teller of the Bayou State Security. Broffin was considering the advisability of wiring for Johnson when he passed the last of the houses on the lakeside drive and struck into the country road which led by cool and shaded forest windings to the resort hotel at the head of the southern bay. If Johnson should fail—and in view of the fact that President Galbraith had failed it was a possibility to be reckoned with—there remained only two doubtful expedients. With Patrick Sheehan's confession to point the way it might be possible to trace the transformed deck-hand from his final interview with McGrath on the Belle Juliestep by step to his appearance, sick and delirious, in Wahaska twenty-four hours later. This was one of the expedients. The other was to take the long chance by clapping the handcuffs upon Griswold in some moment of unpreparedness. It was a well-worn trick, and it did not always succeed in surprising the admission of guilt necessary to make it hold good. And if it should not hold good, there might be consequences. As we have noted, Broffin had once clapped the handcuffs on the wrong man.

Chewing an extinct cigar and ruminating thoughtfully over his problem, Broffin had followed the windings of the country road well into the lake-enclosing forest when he heard the rattle of wheels and the hoof-beats of a horse. Presently the vehicle overtook and passed him. It was Miss Grierson's trap, drawn by the big English trap-horse, with Miss Grierson herself holding the reins and Raymer lounging comfortably in the spare seat.

The sight of the pair moved Broffin to speech apostrophic—when the two were out of earshot. "You're the little lady I'd like to back into a corner," he muttered. "What you know about this business—and wouldn't tell, not if you was gettin' the third degree for it—would tie up all the broken strings in a hurry. How do I know you didn't help him to get out of St. Louis? How do I know that the whole blame sick play wasn't a plant from start to finish?" He stopped and struck viciously at a roadside weed with the switch he had cut. It was a new idea, an idea with promise; and when he went on, the reflective excursion had become a journey with a purpose. Chance had been good to him now and then in his hard-working career: perhaps it would be good to him again. Having let one woman put a stumbling-block in his way, perhaps it was going to even things up by making another woman remove it.

Half an hour later Broffin had followed the huge hoof-prints of the great English trap-horse to the driveway portal of the De Soto grounds where they were lost on the pebbled carriage approach. Strolling on through the grounds into the lake-fronting lobby of the Inn, he was soon able to account for Raymer. The young iron-founder was evidently on business bent. He was sitting in the lobby with a man whom Broffin recognized as the master car builder of the Pineboro Railroad, and the two were discussing mechanical details over a thick file of blue-prints spread out on Raymer's knees. The smile under Broffin's drooping mustaches was a grin of instant comprehension. Miss Grierson, driving Raymer's way, had picked up the iron-founder and brought him along to the business appointment. It was a way she had—when the candidate for the spare seat in the trap happened to be young and good-looking.

Having placed Raymer, Broffin went in search of Miss Grierson. He found her on the broad veranda, alone, and for the moment unoccupied. How to make the attack so direct and so overwhelming that it could not be withstood was the only remaining question; and Broffin had answered it to his own satisfaction, and was advancing through an open French window directly behind Miss Grierson's chair to put the answer into effect, when the opportunity was snatched away. Raymer, with his roll of blue-prints under his arm and his business with the master car builder apparently concluded, came down the veranda and took the chair next to Miss Grierson's.

Broffin dropped back into the writing-room alcove for which the open French window was the outlet and sat down to bide his time, taking care that the chair which he noiselessly placed for himself should be out of sight from the veranda, but not out of earshot. It seemed very unlikely that the two young people who were enjoying the Minnedaskan view would say anything worth listening to; but the ex-harrier of moonshine-makers was of those who discount all chances.

For a time nothing happened. The two on the veranda talked of the view, of the coming regatta, of the latest lawn social given by the Guild of St. John's. Broffin surmised that they were waiting for the trap to be brought around from the hotel stables, though why there should be a delay was not so evident. But in any event his opportunity was lost unless he could contrive to isolate the young woman again. It was while he was groping for the compassing means that Raymer said:

"It's a shame to make you wait this way, Miss Madge. McMurtry said he had an appointment with Mr. Galbraith for three o'clock, and he had to go and keep it. But he ought to be down again by this time. Don't wait for me if you want to go back to town. I can get a lift from somebody."

"That would be nice, wouldn't it?" was the good-natured retort. "To make you tie up your own horse in town and then to leave you stranded away out here three miles from nowhere! I think I see myself doing such a thing! Besides, I haven't a thing to do but to wait."

Broffin shifted the extinct cigar he was chewing from one corner of his mouth to the other and pulled his soft hat lower over his eyes. He, too, could wait. There was a little stir on the veranda; a rustling of silk petticoats and the click of small heels on the hardwood floor. Broffin could not forbear the peering peep around the sheltering window draperies. Miss Grierson had left her seat and was pacing a slow march up and down before Raymer's chair, apparently for Raymer's benefit. The watcher behind the window draperies drew back quickly when she made the turn to face his way, arguing sapiently that whatever significance their further talk might hold would be carefully and thoughtfully neutralized if Miss Grierson should see him. That she had not seen him became a fact sufficiently well-assured when she sat down again and began to speak of Griswold.

"How is the new partnership going, by this time," she asked, after the manner of one who re-winnows the chaff of the commonplaces in the hope of finding grain enough for the immediate need.

"So far as Griswold is concerned, you wouldn't notice that there is a partnership," laughed the iron-founder. "I can't make him galvanize an atom of interest in his investment. All I can get out of him is, 'Don't bother me; I'm busy.'"

"Mr. Griswold is in a class by himself, don't you think?" was the questioning comment.

"He is all kinds of a good fellow; that's all I know, and all I ask to know," answered Raymer loyally.

"I believe that—now," said his companion, with the faintest possible emphasis upon the time-word.

Broffin marked the emphasis, and the pause that preceded it, and leaned forward to miss no word.

"Meaning that there was a time when you didn't believe it?" Raymer asked.

"Meaning that there was a time when he had me scared half to death," confessed the one who seemed always to say the confidential thing as if it were the most trivial. "Do you remember one day in the library, when you found me looking over the files of the newspapers for the story of the robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank in New Orleans?"

Raymer remembered it very well, and admitted it.

"That was the time when the dreadful idea was scaring me stiff," she went on. "You remember the story, don't you? how the president—our Mr. Galbraith here—was held up at the point of a pistol and marched to the paying teller's window, and how the robber escaped on a river steamboat and was recognized by somebody and was arrested at St. Louis?"

"Yes; I remember it all very clearly. Also I recollect how the second newspaper notice told how he escaped from the officers at St. Louis. Wasn't there something about a young woman being mixed up in it some way?"

"There was: she was the one who recognized the robber disguised as a deck-hand on the boat."

Raymer seemed to have forgotten his impatience for a renewal of the interview with the Pineboro Railroad master car builder.

"I don't seem to recall any mention of that in the newspapers," he said half-doubtfully.

"The newspaper reporters didn't put two and two together, but I did," asserted the sharer of confidences. "There was a young woman getting a draft cashed at the teller's window when the robbery was committed. The bank people didn't know her, so she must have been travelling. You see it's simple enough when you put your mind to it."

"But you haven't told me how you were scared," Raymer suggested.

"I'm coming to that. This escape we read about happened on a certain day in April. It was the very day on which poppa met me on my way back from Florida, and we took the eleven-thirty train north that night. You haven't forgotten that Mr. Griswold was a passenger on that same train?"

"But, goodness gracious, Miss Margery! any number of people were passengers on that train. You surely wouldn't——"

"Hush!" she said, and through the lace window hangings Broffin saw her lift a warning finger. "What I am telling you, Mr. Raymer, is in the strictest confidence; we mustn't let a breath of it get out. But that wasn't all. Mr. Griswold was dreadfully sick, and, of course, he couldn't tell us anything about himself. But while he was delirious he was always muttering something about money, money; money that he had lost and couldn't find, or money that he had found and couldn't lose. Then when we thought he couldn't possibly get well, Doctor Bertie and I ransacked his suit-cases for cards or letters or something that would tell us who he was and where he came from. There wasn't the littlest thing!"

"And that was when you began to suspect?" queried Raymer.

"That was when the suspicion began to torture me. I fought it; oh, you don't know how hard I fought it! There he was, lying sick and helpless; utterly unable to do a thing or say a word in his own defence; and yet, if he were the robber, of course, we should have to give him up. It was terrible!"

"I should say so," was Raymer's sympathetic comment. "How did you get it straightened out, at last?"

"It hasn't been altogether straightened out until just lately—within the past few days," she went on gravely. "After he began to get well, I made him talk to me—about himself, you know. There didn't seem to be anything to conceal. At different times he told me all about his home, and his mother, whom he barely remembers, and the big-hearted, open-handed father who made money so easily in his profession—he was the Griswold, the great architect, you know—that he gave it away to anybody who wanted it—but I suppose he has told you all this?"

"No; at least, not very much of it."

Miss Grierson went on smoothly, falling sympathetically into the reminiscent vein.

"Kenneth went to college without ever having known what it was to lack anything in reason that money could buy. A little while after he was graduated his father died."

"Leaving Kenneth poor, I suppose; he has intimated as much to me, once or twice," said Raymer.

"Leaving him awfully poor. He wanted to learn to write, and for a long time he stayed on in New York, living just any old way, and having a dreadfully hard time of it, I imagine, though he would never say much about that part of it. He says he was studying the under-dog, and he has told me some of the most harrowing things he has seen and been through: one of them had a little child in it—a baby that he found in a tenement where the father and mother had both died of starvation ... think of it! And he took the baby away and fed it and kept it...."

Broffin, sitting behind the window draperies, had his elbows on his knees and his head tightly clamped between his hands. He was striving, as the dying strive for breath, to remember. Where had he heard this self-same story of the man who had fought some sort of a studying fight in the back-water of the New York slums? In every detail it came back to him like the recurring scenes of a vivid dream; but the key-notes of time, place, and the man's identity were gone; lost beyond any power of the groping mentality to recall them.

"That is why he thinks he is a Socialist," Miss Grierson was going on evenly. "I've been wondering if you knew these things, and I've wanted to tell you. I've thought it might help you to understand him better if you knew something of what he has been through. But we were talking about my dreadful suspicion. It persisted, you know, right along through everything. At last, I felt that I just must know, at whatever cost. One day when we were driving, I brought him here and—and introduced him to Mr. Galbraith. I was so scared that I could taste it—but I did it!"

Raymer laughed. "Of course, nothing came of it?"

"Nothing at all; and the reaction pretty nearly made me faint. They just made talk, like any two freshly introduced people would, and that was all there was of it. You'd say that was proof enough, wouldn't you? Surely Mr. Galbraith would recognize the man who robbed him?"

"Certainly; there couldn't be any doubt of that."

"That's what I said. And then, right out of a clear sky, came another proof that was even more convincing. Do you happen to know who the young woman was who discovered the bank robber on the steamboat?"

"I? How should I know?"

"I didn't know but she had told you," was the demure rejoinder. "It was Charlotte Farnham."

"What!" ejaculated Raymer. But he was not more deeply moved than was the man behind the window curtains. If Broffin's dead cigar had not been already reduced to shapeless inutility, Miss Grierson's cool announcement, carrying with it the assurance that his secret was no secret, would have settled it.

"It's so," she was adding calmly. "I found out. She and her aunt were passengers on the Belle Julie; that was the boat the robber escaped on, you remember. Doctor Bertie told me that. And she was the young woman who was having the draft cashed in the Bayou State Security. How do I know? Because her father bought the draft at poppa's bank, and in the course of time it came back with the Bayou State Security's dated paying stamp on it. See how easy it was!"

Raymer's laugh was not altogether mirthful.

"You are a witch," he said. "Is there anything that you don't know?"

"Not so very many things that I really need to know," was the mildly boastful retort. "But you see, now, how foolish my suspicions were. Mr. Galbraith meets Mr. Griswold just as he would any other nice young man; and Charlotte Farnham, who recognized the robber even when he was disguised as a deck-hand, sees Mr. Griswold pretty nearly every day."

Raymer nodded. Though he would not have admitted it under torture, the entire matter figured somewhat as a mountain constructed out of a rather small mole-hill to a man for whom the subtleties lay in a region unexplored. He wondered that the clear-minded little "social climber," as his sister called her, had ever bothered her nimble brain about such an abstruse and far-fetched question of identities.

"You said, a few minutes ago, that Griswold calls himself a Socialist. That isn't quite the word. He is a sociologist."

Miss Grierson ignored the nice distinction in names.

"Socialism goes with being poor, doesn't it?" she remarked. "Since Mr. Griswold's ship has come in, I suppose he finds it easier, and pleasanter, to be a theoretical leveller than a practical one."

"That is another thing I have never been quite able to understand," said the iron-founder. "You say his father left him poor: where did he get his money?"

"Why, don't you know?" was the innocent query. And then, with a pretty affectation of embarrassment, real or perfectly simulated: "If he hasn't told you, I mustn't."

"Of course, I don't want to pry," said Raymer, loyal again.

"I can give you a hint, and that is all. Don't you remember 'My Lady Jezebel,' the unsigned novel that made such a hit last summer?"

"Why, bless goodness, yes! Did he write that?"

"He has never admitted it in so many words. But I'll divide a little secret with you. He has been reading bits of his new book to me, and pshaw! a blind person could tell! I asked him once if he could guess how much the author of 'My Lady Jezebel' had been paid, and he said, with the most perfectly transparent carelessness: 'Oh, about a hundred thousand, I suppose.'"

"Tally!" said Raymer, laughing. "Griswold has put an even ninety thousand into my little egg-basket out at the plant. But, of course you knew that, everybody in Wahaska knows it by this time."

"Yes; I knew it."

"I'm glad it's book money," Raymer went on. "If we should happen to go smash, he won't feel the loss quite so fiercely. I have a friend over in Wisconsin; he is a laboratory professor in mechanics, and he writes books on the side. He says a book is a pure gamble. If you win, you have that much more money to throw to the dicky-birds. If you lose, you've merely drawn the usual blank."

Miss Grierson did not reply, and for a little while they were both silent. Then Raymer said:

"I wonder if McMurtry doesn't think I've dropped out on him. I guess I'd better go and see. Don't wait any longer on my motions, unless you want to, Miss Margery."

When Raymer had gone, the opportunity which Broffin had so lately craved was his. Miss Grierson was left alone on the big veranda, and he had only to step out and confront her. Instead, he got up quietly and went back through the lobby with his head down and his hands in his pockets, and the surviving bit of the dead cigar disappeared between his strong teeth and became a cud of chagrin. There had been a goal in sight, but Miss Grierson had beat him to it.

And the winner of the small handicap? For the time it took Raymer to disappear she sat perfectly still, in the attitude of one who stifles all the other senses that the listening ear may hear and strike the note of warning or of relief. A group of young people, returning from a steam-launch circuit of the upper lake, came up the steps to disperse itself with pleasant human clatterings on the veranda; but in spite of the distractions the listening ear caught the sound for which it was straining. With a deep breath-drawing that was almost a sob, Miss Grierson sprang up, stole a swift confirming glance at the empty chair behind the window hangings, and crossed the veranda to stand with one arm around a supporting pillar. And since the battle was fought and won, and the friendly pillar gave its stay and shelter, the velvety eyes filled suddenly and the ripe red lips were trembling like the lips of a frightened child.