It was Stuart, our confidential clerk for the last half dozen years!

McKnight sat up and wiped his eyes.

“Stuart,” he said sternly, “there are two very serious things we have learned about you.  First, you jab your scarf pins into your cushion with your left hand, which is most reprehensible; second, you wear—­er—­night-shirts, instead of pajamas.  Worse than that, perhaps, we find that one of them has a buttonhole torn out at the neck.”

Stuart was bewildered.  He looked from McKnight to me, and then at the crestfallen Hotchkiss.

“I haven’t any idea what it’s all about,” he said.  “I was arrested as I reached my boarding-house to-night, after the theater, and brought directly here.  I told the officer it was a mistake.”

Poor Hotchkiss tried bravely to justify the fiasco.  “You can not deny,” he contended, “that Mr. Andrew Bronson followed you to your rooms last Monday evening.”

Stuart looked at us and flushed.

“No, I don’t deny it,” he said, “but there was nothing criminal about it, on my part, at least.  Mr. Bronson has been trying to induce me to secure the forged notes for him.  But I did not even know where they were.”

“And you were not on the wrecked Washington Flier?” persisted Hotchkiss.  But McKnight interfered.

“There is no use trying to put the other man’s identity on Stuart, Mr. Hotchkiss,” he protested.  “He has been our confidential clerk for six years, and has not been away from the office a day for a year.  I am afraid that the beautiful fabric we have pieced out of all these scraps is going to be a crazy quilt.”  His tone was facetious, but I could detect the undercurrent of real disappointment.

I paid the constable for his trouble, and he departed.  Stuart, still indignant, left to go back to Washington Circle.  He shook hands with McKnight and myself magnanimously, but he hurled a look of utter hatred at Hotchkiss, sunk crestfallen in his chair.

“As far as I can see,” said McKnight dryly, “we’re exactly as far along as we were the day we met at the Carter place.  We’re not a step nearer to finding our man.”

“We have one thing that may be of value,” I suggested.  “He is the husband of a bronze-haired woman at Van Kirk’s hospital, and it is just possible we may trace him through her.  I hope we are not going to lose your valuable co-operation, Mr. Hotchkiss?” I asked.

He roused at that to feeble interest, “I—­oh, of course not, if you still care to have me, I—­I was wondering about—­the man who just went out, Stuart, you say?  I—­told his landlady to-night that he wouldn’t need the room again.  I hope she hasn’t rented it to somebody else.”

We cheered him as best we could, and I suggested that we go to Baltimore the next day and try to find the real Sullivan through his wife.  He left sometime after midnight, and Richey and I were alone.