Youth, inexperience in doing such consecutive and eliminative thinking, he knew, hampered him. With a mind trained, through solving chemical, electrical and other industrial experimental difficulties, Grover’s clever mind had skipped many of the links that Roger, slowly, had to take up and examine.
He was in the taxi, with bundles of back issues of the city papers, on his way back, and still his mind was a maze of unfitted details.
In the office, combing the papers for notes about snakes, or any other escaped reptile—he had to keep in mind that trail on the edge of the steps alone!—he got nowhere.
No news showed up about lost, stolen or escaped animals or any form of brute or reptile.
Grover, he saw, had returned, and was not joyful.
“One theory went to smash,” he said, “I verified your sound—claws on glass was the right deduction. But—that doesn’t bring what I want.”
“What do you want?” asked Roger, eagerly.
“To capture the culprit.”
“Won’t the police?——”
“We have no justification for calling them in. Nothing has been stolen. Nothing has been harmed.”