"Exactly. He made a fire in the grate and left some ashes of paper, I see."
Old Broadbrim stepped across the room and bent over the ashes on the little hearth.
Scooping up a handful of fragments, he came back to the table and sat down.
Tom Owens bent over his shoulder and saw Old Broadbrim separate the bits of charred paper with fingers as delicate as a woman's.
All at once the detective stopped and pointed at two pieces which lay side by side.
"What is it?" eagerly asked Owens.
"A letter in the same handwriting that we found in the house on Fifth Avenue."
"That settles the matter. You are surely on the right trail."
The face of the New York detective seemed to light up with a gleam of triumph, and then he swept the papers together and put them into his inner pocket.
"The right trail?" he cried. "Of course, Tom. It remains only to find this man. I'll attend to the rest. We'll fix the crime upon him and there'll be a broken neck under the sheriff's noose."