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?"