The person thus vaguely described appeared on the spot the next morning.  To mention the name of Edward Taggett is to mention a name well known to the detective force of the great city lying sixty miles southwest of Stillwater.  Mr. Taggett’s arrival sent such a thrill of expectancy through the village that Mr. Leonard Tappleton, whose obsequies occurred this day, made his exit nearly unobserved.  Yet there was little in Mr. Taggett’s physical aspect calculated to stir either expectation or enthusiasm:  a slender man of about twenty-six, but not looking it, with overhanging brown mustache, sparse side-whiskers, eyes of no definite color, and faintly accentuated eyebrows.  He spoke precisely, and with a certain unembarrassed hesitation, as persons do who have two thoughts to one word,—­if there are such persons.  You might have taken him for a physician, or a journalist, or the secretary of an insurance company; but you would never have supposed him the man who had disentangled the complicated threads of the great Barnabee Bank defalcation.

Stillwater’s confidence, which had risen into the nineties, fell to zero at sight of him.  “Is that Taggett?” they asked.  That was Taggett; and presently his influence began to be felt like a sea-turn.  The three Dogberrys of the watch were dispatched on secret missions, and within an hour it was ferreted out that a man in a cart had been seen driving furiously up the turnpike the morning after the murder.  This was an agricultural district, the road led to a market town, and teams going by in the early dawn were the rule and not the exception; but on that especial morning a furiously driven cart was significant.  Jonathan Beers, who farmed the Jenks land, had heard the wheels and caught an indistinct glimpse of the vehicle as he was feeding the cattle, but with a reticence purely rustic had not been moved to mention the circumstance before.

“Taggett has got a clew,” said Stillwater under its breath.

By noon Taggett had got the man, cart and all.  But it was only Blufton’s son Tom, of South Millville, who had started in hot haste that particular morning to secure medical service for his wife, of which she had sorely stood in need, as two tiny girls in a willow cradle in South Millville now bore testimony.

“I haven’t been cutting down the population much," said Blufton, with his wholesome laugh.

Thomas Blufton was well known and esteemed in Stillwater, but if the crime had fastened itself upon him it would have given something like popular satisfaction.

In the course of the ensuing forty-eight hours four or five tramps were overhauled as having been in the neighborhood at the time of the tragedy; but they each had a clean story, and were let go.  Then one Durgin, a workman at Slocum’s Yard, was called upon to explain some half-washed-out red stains on his overalls, which he did.  He had tightened the hoops on a salt-pork barrel for Mr. Shackford several days previous; the red paint on the head of the barrel was fresh, and had come off on his clothes.  Dr. Weld examined the spots under a microscope, and pronounced them paint.  It was manifest that Mr. Taggett meant to go to the bottom of things.