Mr. Stapleton raised his hand. "My dear Duvall," he began, "but for you, we should have been nowhere."
"You are wrong, my friend. Had I kept out of the case altogether, your son would have been returned to you just the same. It is true that the men who kidnapped him would not have been caught, and your money would not have been returned to you; but the prime object which you sought, the recovery of your child, would have been realized in any event."
"That is true," remarked the Prefect; "but, from the standpoint of the police, it is the detection and capture of the criminal that is desired, not the buying of him off. By insisting on that, Mr. Stapleton, you rendered our work extremely difficult."
"So difficult, indeed," said Duvall, earnestly, "that but for the energy, the courage, the wit of a woman, all our plans would have failed. I refer to my wife. It is to her that all the credit in this affair is due."
"By all means!" said Mr. Stapleton. "I could not fail to realize, when she told her story at dinner tonight, how much Mrs. Stapleton and myself owe her. I shall have something to say on the subject of our debt, as soon as the ladies rejoin us. But tell us, Mr. Duvall, a little more about the case, as you now understand it. I confess that I am becoming more and more interested. What, for instance, was the mystery, if indeed there was any, connected with the box of gold-tipped cigarettes?"
Duvall smiled. "That, my dear sir, is in fact the crux, the starting point, of the whole affair." He settled back in his chair comfortably. "Otherwise the case was simple enough. Certain scoundrels steal a child, hold it for ransom, and frighten the parents into paying over a large sum. Nothing unusual in that. A clever scheme or two for turning the money over, and returning the child—simple, yet perfect enough to defy all attempts to foil them.
"The real mystery lay in the utter absence of any clues which would throw light on the actual stealing of the child. In this respect the case was unique. A trusted nurse swears that the child has disappeared in broad daylight, without the slightest knowledge of how it was accomplished. Here we have a case so simple, so devoid of incident of any sort, that we are baffled at the very start by the impossibility of the thing. Yet the nurse is a woman of good reputation, honest, clearly telling what she believes to be the truth.
"But a single clue existed upon which I could build the least semblance of a case. I refer to the half-smoked cigarette with the gold tip, which I discovered in the grass at the scene of the crime. Without that apparently trivial clue, the criminals would in all probability never have been captured at all."
"But," exclaimed Mr. Stapleton, "I don't see how you make that out."
"Nor I," observed the Prefect.