m Central
America. As a matter of fact, there was an express-company case waiting
which promised more money. But emulation counts for something, even in
the thief-catching field; and since two members of his own staff had
fired and missed their mark in St. Louis, there was a blunder to be
retrieved.

Reasoning logically upon the new problem, Broffin did not at once try to
take up the chase at the point to which it had been carried by the two
who had failed. Since the man had disappeared, the first necessity was
the establishing of his true identity, and for a week Broffin devoted
himself to the task of disentangling the two personalities: that of the
decently dressed, parlor-anarchist bank-raider, and that of the man who
figured in the anonymous letter as Gavitt, the deck-hand.

At the end of the week two facts were sufficiently apparent. The first
was that there had been a real John Gavitt, a consumptive roustabout on
the New Orleans river-front; a person easily traceable up to the time of
his disappearance on or about the day of the robbery, and whose
description, gathered from those who had known him well, tallied not at
all with the best obtainable word-picture of the bank-robber. Fact the
second was a corollary of the first: by some means the robber had
contrived to change places with Gavitt; to take his place in the _Belle
Julie's_ crew and to assume his name.

Broffin called this step in the outworking of his problem an incident
closed when he had wired the post-master of the little Iowa river town
from which the true Gavitt had migrated, and had received the expected
reply. John Wesley Gavitt had reached home two days after the date of
the bank robbery, had died within the week, and had been buried beside
his wife.

The next step was purely constructive; an attempt to build, upon the
description given by President Galbraith and the teller Johnson, a
likeness which would fit some notorious "strong-arm man" known to the
criminal records and the rogues' galleries. Broffin was not greatly
disappointed when the effort failed.

"It's just about as I've been putting it up, all along," he mused,
lighting his pipe and filling with a fragrant cloud the cramped little
office in which he did his research work. "The fellow ain't a crook;
he's an amateur, and this is his first break. That being the lay-out,
he's liable to do all the things, the different kinds of things, that a
sure-enough 'strong-arm man' wouldn't do."