JASON GOES UPON A JOURNEY, AND RICHARD HARTLEY PLEADS FOR HIM

It may as well be admitted at the outset that neither Ste. Marie nor Richard Hartley proved themselves to be geniuses, hitherto undeveloped, in the detective science.  They entered upon their self-appointed task with a fine fervor, but, as Miss Benham had suggested, with no other qualifications in particular.  Ste. Marie had a theory that, when engaged in work of this nature, you went into questionable parts of the city, ate and drank cheek by jowl with questionable people—­if possible, got them drunk while you remained sober (difficult feat), and sooner or later they said things which put you on the right road to your goal, or else confessed to you that they themselves had committed the particular crime in which you were interested.  He argued that this was the way it happened in books, and that surely people didn’t write books about things of which they were ignorant.

Hartley, on the other hand, preferred the newer, or scientific, methods.  You sat at home with a pipe and a whiskey-and-water—­if possible, in a long dressing-gown with a cord round its middle.  You reviewed all the known facts of the case, and you did mathematics about them with Xs and Ys and many other symbols, and in the end, by a system of elimination, you proved that a certain thing must infallibly be true.  The chief difficulty for him in this was, he said, that he had been at Oxford instead of at Cambridge, and so the mathematics were rather beyond him.

In practice, however, they combined the two methods, which was doubtless as well as if they hadn’t, because for some time they accomplished nothing whatever, and so neither one was able to sneer at the other’s stupidity.

This is not to say that they found nothing in the way of clews.  They found an embarrassment of them, and for some days went about in a fever of excitement over these; but the fever cooled when clew after clew turned out to be misleading.  Of course, Ste. Marie’s first efforts were directed toward tracing the movements of the Irishman O’Hara, but the efforts were altogether unavailing.  The man seemed to have disappeared as noiselessly and completely as had young Arthur Benham himself.  He was unable even to settle with any definiteness the time of the man’s departure from Paris.  Some of O’Hara’s old acquaintances maintained that they had seen the last of him two months before, but a shifty-eyed person in rather cheaply smart clothes came up to Ste. Marie one evening in Maxim’s and said he had heard that Ste. Marie was making inquiries about M. O’Hara.  Ste. Marie said he was, and that it was an affair of money; whereupon the cheaply smart individual declared that M. O’Hara had left Paris six months before to go to the United States of America, and that he had had a picture postal-card from him, some weeks since, from New York.  The informant accepted an expensive cigar and a Dubonnet by way of reward, but presently departed into the night, and Ste. Marie was left in some discouragement, his theory badly damaged.