“Look here, Dexter,” said Durgin, turning quickly on the speaker, “when I want to joke, I talk about your intelligence.”

“What kind of man is Taggett, anyhow?” asked Piggott.  “You saw him, Durgin.”

“I believe he was at Justice Beemis’s office the day Blufton and I was there; but I didn’t make him out in the crowd.  Shouldn’t know him from Adam.”

“Stillwater’s a healthy place for tramps jest about this time,” suggested somebody.  “Three on ’em snaked in to-day.”

“I think, gentlemen, that Mr. Taggett is on the right track there,” observed Mr. Snelling, in the act of mixing another Old Holland for Mr. Peters.  “Not too sweet, you said?  I feel it in my bones that it was a tramp, and that Mr. Taggett will bring him yet.”

“He won’t find him on the highway yonder,” said a tgall, swarthy man named Torrini, an Italian.  Nationalities clash in Stillwater.  “That tramp is a thousand miles from here.”

“So he is if he has any brains under his hat,” returned Snelling.  “But they’re on the lookout for him.  The minute he pawns anything, he’s gone.”

“Can’t put up greenbacks or gold, can he?  He didn’t take nothing else,” interposed Bishop, the veterinary surgeon.

“Now jewelry nor nothing?”

“There wasn’t none, as I understand it,” said Bishop, “except a silver watch.  That was all snug under the old man’s piller.”

“Wanter know!” ejaculated Jonathan Beers.

“I opine, Mr. Craggie,” said the school-master, standing in the inner room with a rolled-up file of the Daily Advertiser in his hand, “that the person who—­who removed our worthy townsman will never be discovered.”

“I shouldn’t like to go quite so far as that, sir,” answered Mr. Craggie, with that diplomatic suavity which leads to postmasterships and seats in the General Court, and has even been known to oil a dull fellow’s way into Congress.  “I cannot take quite so hopeless a view of it.  There are difficulties, but they must be overcome, Mr. Pinkham, and I think they will be.”

“Indeed, I hope so,” returned the school-master.  “But there are cases—­are there not?—­in which the—­the problem, if I may so designate it, has never been elucidated, and the persons who undertook it have been obliged to go to the foot, so to speak.”

“Ah, yes, there are such cases, certainly.  There was the Burdell mystery in New York, and, later, the Nathan affair—­By the way, I’ve satisfactory theories of my own touching both.  The police were baffled, and remain so.  But, my dear sir, observe for a moment the difference.”

Mr. Pinkham rested one finger on the edge of a little round table, and leaned forward in a respectful attitude to observe the difference.