This is not to say that they found nothing in the way of clues. They found an embarrassment of them, and for some days went about in a fever of excitement over these; but the fever cooled when clue after clue turned out to be misleading. Of course Ste. Marie's first efforts were directed towards tracing the movements of the Irishman, O'Hara, but the efforts were altogether unavailing. The man seemed to have disappeared as noiselessly and completely as had young Arthur Benham himself. He was unable even to settle with any definiteness the time of the man's departure from Paris. Some of O'Hara's old acquaintances maintained that they had seen the last of him two months before, but a shifty-eyed person in rather cheaply smart clothes came up to Ste. Marie one evening in Maxim's, and said he had heard that Ste. Marie was making inquiries about M. O'Hara. Ste. Marie said he was, and that it was an affair of money, whereupon the cheaply smart individual declared that M. O'Hara had left Paris six months before to go to the United States of America, and that he had had a picture postal card, some weeks since, from New York. The informant accepted an expensive cigar and a Dubonnet by way of reward, but presently departed into the night, and Ste. Marie was left in some discouragement, his theory badly damaged.
He spoke of this encounter to Richard Hartley, who came on later to join him, and Hartley, after an interval of silence and smoke, said—
"That was a lie. The man lied."
"Name of a dog, why?" demanded Ste. Marie, but the Englishman shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't know," he said. "But I believe it was a lie. The man came to you, sought you out to tell his story, didn't he? And all the others have given a different date? Well, there you are! For some reason this man or some one behind him—O'Hara himself, probably—wants you to believe that O'Hara is in America. I dare say he's in Paris all the while."
"I hope you're right," said the other. "And I mean to make sure, too. It certainly was odd, this strange being hunting me out to tell me that. I wonder, by the way, how he knew I'd been making inquiries about O'Hara. I've questioned only two or three people, and then in the most casual way. Yes, it's odd."
It was about a week after this—a fruitless week, full of the alternate brightness of hope and the gloom of disappointment—that he met Captain Stewart, to whom he had been more than once on the point of appealing. He happened upon him quite by chance one morning in the Rue Royale. Captain Stewart was coming out of a shop, a very smart-looking shop, devoted, as Ste. Marie, with some surprise and much amusement, observed, to ladies' hats, and the price of hats must have depressed him, for he looked in an ill humour and older and more yellow than usual. But his face altered suddenly when he saw the younger man, and he stopped, and shook Ste. Marie's hand with every evidence of pleasure.
"Well met! well met!" he exclaimed. "If you are not in a hurry, come and sit down somewhere and tell me about yourself."
They picked their way across the street to the terrace of the Taverne Royale, which was almost deserted at that hour, and sat down at one of the little tables well back from the pavement, in a corner.
"Is it fair?" queried Captain Stewart, "is it fair as a rival investigator to ask you what success you have had?" Ste. Marie laughed rather ruefully and confessed that he had as yet no success at all.