for lunch:
were you feeding many people just then?"

"H-onlee one; he is yo'ng man w'at don' nevveh come on my 'otel biffo'.
He is sit on dat secon' table; _oui_!"

Broffin pushed the probe of inquiry a little deeper. How did M.
Pouillard happen to remember? _Mais_, it was because the young man was
very droll; he was of the cold blood. When Victor, _le garcon_, would
have brought news of the _emeute_, he had said, breakfast first, and the
news afterward.

Questioned in his turn, the serving-man corroborated his employer's
particulars and was able to add a few of his own. The young man was
fair, with blue eyes and a reddish beard and mustaches. The mustaches
were untrimmed, but the beard was clipped to a point, _a les moeurs des
etudiants des Beaux Arts_. The waiter had once served tables in a Paris
cafe, and he seldom lost an opportunity of advertising the fact. Pressed
to account for his accurate memory picture of a chance patron, he
confessed naively; the tip had been princely and the young man was one
to mark and to remember--and to serve again.

Broffin left the restaurant with one more link in the chain neatly
forged. There was an excellent reason why none of the first-aid pursuers
had been able to catch a glimpse of the "strong-arm man." He had merely
stepped from the bank entrance to Monsieur Pouillard's. Between the cafe
breakfast and the departure of the _Belle Julie_ there lay an hour and a
quarter. In that interval he could easily perfect his simple disguise.
Broffin was not specially interested in the incidental minutiae. It was
the identity of the man with the untrimmed mustaches and the pointed
beard that must be established.

After another week of patient groping, Broffin was obliged to confess
that the problem of identification was too difficult to be solved on
conventional lines. It presented no point of attack. With neither a name
nor a pictured face for reference, inquiry was crippled at the very
outset. None of the many boarding- and rooming-houses he visited had
lost a lodger answering the verbal description of the missing man. Very
reluctantly, for bull-dog tenacity was the detective's ruling
characteristic, he was forced to the conclusion that the only untried
solution lay in Teller Johnson's unfortified impression that the chance
meeting at his wicket was not the first meeting between the robber and
the young woman with the draft to be cashed.

It was the slenderest of threads, and Broffin