"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.