ving round the town that day--silent, massive,
imperturbable--gave one a great idea of their strange, dangerous
calling. They went about the town all day and yet in such a quiet
peculiar way that you couldn't have realized that they were working at
all. They ate their dinner together at Smith's cafe and took an hour and
a half over it to throw people off the scent. Then when they got them
off it, they sat and talked with Josh Smith in the back bar to keep them
off. Mr. Smith seemed to take to them right away. They were men of his
own size, or near it, and anyway hotel men and detectives have a
general affinity and share in the same impenetrable silence and in their
confidential knowledge of the weaknesses of the public.

Mr. Smith, too, was of great use to the detectives. "Boys," he said, "I
wouldn't ask too close as to what folks was out late at night: in this
town it don't do."

When those two great brains finally left for the city on the
five-thirty, it was hard to realize that behind each grand, impassible
face a perfect vortex of clues was seething.

But if the detectives were heroes, what was Pupkin? Imagine him with
his bandage on his head standing in front of the bank and talking of the
midnight robbery with that peculiar false modesty that only heroes are
entitled to use.

I don't know whether you have ever been a hero, but for sheer
exhilaration there is nothing like it. And for Mr. Pupkin, who had gone
through life thinking himself no good, to be suddenly exalted into the
class of Napoleon Bonaparte and John Maynard and the Charge of the Light
Brigade--oh, it was wonderful. Because Pupkin was a brave man now and
he knew it and acquired with it all the brave man's modesty. In fact,
I believe he was heard to say that he had only done his duty, and that
what he did was what any other man would have done: though when somebody
else said: "That's so, when you come to think of it," Pupkin turned on
him that quiet look of the wounded hero, bitterer than words.

And if Pupkin had known that all of the afternoon papers in the city
reported him dead, he would have felt more luxurious still.

That afternoon the Mariposa court sat in enquiry,--technically it was
summoned in inquest on the dead robber--though they hadn't found the
body--and it was wonderful to see them lining up the witnesses and
holding cross-examinations. There is something in the cross-examination
of great criminal lawyers like Nivens, of Mariposa