Directly after closing time to-day—which was noon, as this was Saturday—Knapp, the cashier of the bank, had discovered a heavy shortage, and it was decided on a quick investigation that Edward Clayte, one of the paying tellers, had walked out with the money in a suitcase. I was immediately called in on what appeared a wide-open trail, with me so close behind Clayte that you'd have said there was nothing to it. I followed him—and the suitcase—to his apartment at the St. Dunstan, found he'd got there at twenty-five minutes to one, and I barely three quarters of an hour after.

"How do you get the exact minute Clayte arrived?" Anson stopped me at this point, "and the positive knowledge that he had the suitcase with him?"

"Clayte asked the time—from the clerk at the desk—as he came in. He put the suitcase down while he set his watch. The clerk saw him pick it up and go into the elevator; Mrs. Griggsby, a woman at work mending carpet on the seventh floor—which is his—saw him come out of the elevator carrying it, and let himself into his room. There the trail ends."

"Ends?" As my voice halted young Gilbert's word came like a bullet. "The trail can't end unless the man was there."

"Or the suitcase," little old Sillsbee quavered, and Worth Gilbert gave him a swift, half-humorous glance.

"Bath and bedroom," I said, "that suite has three[Pg 6] windows, seven stories above the ground. I found them all locked—not mere latches—the St. Dunstan has burglar-proof locks. No disturbance in the room; all neat, in place, the door closed with the usual spring lock; and I had to get Mrs. Griggsby to move, since she was tacking the carpet right at the threshold. Everything was in that room that should have been there—except Clayte and the suitcase."

[Pg 6]

The babel of complaint and suggestion broke out as I finished, exactly as it had done when I got to this point before: "The Griggsby woman ought to be kept under surveillance"; "The clerk, the house servants ought to be watched,"—and so on, and so on. I curtly reiterated my assurance that such routine matters had been promptly and thoroughly attended to. My nerves were getting raw. I'm not so young as I was. This promised to be one of those grinding cases where the detective agency is run through the rollers so many times that it comes out pretty slim in the end, whether that end is failure or success.

The only thing in sight that it didn't 

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