And he went away down the hall, leaving me staring after him.

CHAPTER XXII

“CROCHARD, L’INVINCIBLE!”

It seemed for once that Godfrey was destined to be wrong, for the days passed and nothing happened—­nothing, that is, in so far as the cabinet was concerned.  There was an inquest, of course, over the victim of the latest tragedy, and once again I was forced to give my evidence before a coroner’s jury.  I must confess that, this time, it made me appear considerable of a fool, and the papers poked sly fun at the attorney who had walked blindly into a trap which, now that it was sprung, seemed so apparent.

The Bertillon measurements of the victim had been cabled to Paris, and he had been instantly identified as a fellow named Morel, well-known to the police as a daring and desperate criminal; in fact, M. Lepine considered the matter so important that he cabled next day that he was sending Inspector Pigot to New York to investigate the affair further, and to confer with our bureau as to the best methods to be taken to apprehend the murderer.  Inspector Pigot, it was added, would sail at once for Havre on La Savoie.

Meanwhile, Grady’s men, with Simmonds at their head, strained every nerve to discover the whereabouts of the fugitive; a net was thrown over the entire city, but, while a number of fish were captured, the one which the police particularly wished for was not among them.  Not a single trace of the fugitive was discovered; he had vanished absolutely, and, after a day or two, Grady asserted confidently that he had left New York.

For Grady had come back into the case again, goaded by the papers, particularly by the Record, to efforts which he must have considered superhuman.  The remarkable nature of the mystery, its picturesque and unique features, the fact that three men had been killed within a few days in precisely the same manner, and the absence of any reasonable hypothesis to explain these deaths—­all this served to rivet public attention.  Every amateur detective in the country had a theory to exploit—­and far-fetched enough most of them were!

Grady did a lot of talking in those days, explaining in detail the remarkable measures he was taking to capture the criminal; but the fact remained that three men had been killed, and that no one had been punished; that a series of crimes had been committed, and that the criminal was still at large, and seemed likely to remain so; and, naturally enough, the papers, having exhausted every other phase of the case, were soon echoing public sentiment that something was wrong somewhere, and that the detective bureau needed an overhauling, beginning at the top.

The Boule cabinet remained locked up in a cell at the Twenty-third Street station; and Simmonds kept the key in his pocket.  I know now that he was as much in the dark concerning the cabinet as the general public was; and the general public was very much in the dark indeed, for the cabinet had not figured in the accounts of the first two tragedies at all, and only incidentally in the reports of the latest one.  As far as it was concerned, the affair seemed clear enough to most of the reporters, as an attempt to smuggle into the country an art object of great value.  Such cases were too common to attract especial attention.