This problem threatened even greater difficulties than any hitherto, and Paul shivered as the raw Lake wind searched through his clothes.  He wondered if it had been as cold as this when the girl arrived in Buffalo.  Yes, assuredly.  Then why did she go out with only one mitten?  His reason told him that the other one had been lost by the police.  But the police are careful, as a rule.  They had saved every other article found in the girl’s possession, even to a brooch and pin and scrap of paper.  Probably the girl herself had lost it.  But country dressmakers are careful, too; they are not given to losing mittens, especially in cold weather.  It was more reasonable to believe that she had mislaid it among her belongings; inasmuch as those belongings, according to Paul’s logic, were doubtless contained in her trunk, that was probably where the missing mitten would be found.  But, after all, had she really brought a trunk with her?

Like a flash came the recollection of that key stuck to the bottom of the girl’s leather purse at the coroner’s office.  Ten minutes later Paul was back at the City Hall.

For a second time he was greeted with laughter by the reportorial squad; again he paid no heed.

“Why, you saw those things not two hours ago,” protested the coroner’s clerk, in answer to his inquiry.

“I want to see them again.”

“Well, I’m busy.  You’ve had them once, that’s enough.”

“Friend,” said Anderson, quietly, “I want those things and I want them quick.  You give them to me or I’ll go to the man higher up and get them—­and your job along with them.”

The fellow obeyed reluctantly.  Paul picked the key loose and examined it closely.  While he was thus engaged, one of the reporters behind him said: 

“Aha!  At last he has the key to the mystery.”

The general laughter ceased abruptly when the object of this banter thrust the key into his pocket and advanced threateningly toward the speaker, his face white with rage.  The latter rose to his feet; he undertook to execute a dignified retreat, but Anderson seized him viciously, flung him back, and pinned him against the wall, crying, furiously: 

“You dirty rat!  If you open your face to me again, I’ll brain you, and that goes for all of this death-watch.”  He took in the other five men with his reddened eyes.  “When you fellows see me coming, hole up.  Understand?”

His grip was so fierce, his mouth had such a wicked twist to it, that his victim understood him perfectly and began to grin in a sickly, apologetic fashion.  Paul reseated the reporter at his desk with such violence that a chair leg gave way; then he strode out of the building.

For the next few hours Anderson tramped the streets in impotent anger, striving to master himself, for that trifling episode had so upset him that he could not concentrate his mind upon the subject in hand.  When he tried to do so his conclusions seemed grotesquely fanciful and farfetched.  This delay was all the more annoying because on the morrow the girl was to be buried, and, therefore, the precious hours were slipping away.  He tried repeatedly to attain that abstract, subconscious mood in which alone shines the pure light of inductive reasoning.