So that was why no word had come in answer to all this newspaper publicity.  After all, this case might not be so difficult as it had seemed; for the first time the dispirited youth felt a faint glow of encouragement.  He began to formulate a plan.

Hurriedly he fumbled for his note-book, and there, in that house of death, with his paper propped against the wall, he wrote a two-hundred-word description; a description so photographically exact that to this day it is preserved in the Buffalo police archives as a perfect model.

He replaced the body in its resting-place and went out.  There was no chill in him now, no stumbling nor weakness of any sort.  He had found a starting-point, had uncovered what all those trained newspaper men had missed, and he felt that he had a chance to win.

Twenty minutes later Burns, who had just come in from supper, turned back from his desk with annoyance and challenge in his little, narrow eyes.

“Well?”

“I think I’ve got her, Mr. Burns.”

“Nonsense!”

“Anyhow, I’ve got a description that her father or her mother or her friends can recognize.  The one you and the other papers printed disguised her so that nobody could tell who she was—­it might have covered a hundred girls.”

Rapidly, and without noting the editor’s growing impatience, Paul read the two descriptions, then ran on, breathlessly: 

“All we have to do is print ten or twenty thousand of these and mail them out with the morning edition—­separate sheets, posters, you understand?—­so they can be nailed up in every post-office within two hundred miles.  Send some to the police of all the cities, and we’ll have a flash in twenty-four hours.”

Burns made no comment for a moment.  Instead, he looked the young man over angrily from his eager face to his unblacked shoes.  His silence, his stare, were eloquent.

“Why?  Why not?” Anderson demanded, querulously.  “I tell you this description isn’t right.  It—­it’s nothing like her, nothing at all.”

“Say!  I thought I’d seen the last of you,” growled the corpulent man.  “Aren’t you on to yourself yet?”

“Do you—­mean that your talk this evening don’t go?” Paul demanded, quietly.  “Do you mean to say you won’t even give me the chance you promised?”

“No!  I don’t mean that.  What I said goes, all right, but I told you to identify this girl.  I didn’t agree to do it.  What d’you think this paper is, anyhow?  We want stories in this office.  We don’t care who or what this girl is unless there’s a story in her.  We’re not running a job-print shop nor a mail-order business to identify strayed females.  Twenty thousand posters!  Bah!  And say—­don’t you know that no two men can write similar descriptions of anybody or anything?  What’s the difference whether her hair is burnished gold or ‘raw gold’ or her eyes bluish gray instead of grayish blue?  Rats!  Beat it!”