Here, then, he began his probing of a case which, on the surface, promised to be a very simple one.  The man who had been seen driving rapidly along the turnpike sometime near daybreak, on Wednesday, was presumably the man who could tell him all about it.  But it did not prove so.  Neither Thomas Blufton, nor William Durgin, nor any of the tramps subsequently obliged to drop into autobiography could be connected with the affair.

These first failures served to stimulate Mr. Taggett; it required a complex case to stir his ingenuity and sagacity.  That the present was not a complex case he was still convinced, after four days’ futile labor upon it.  Mr. Shackford had been killed—­either with malice prepense or on the spur of the moment—­for his money.  The killing had likely enough not been premeditated; the old man had probably opposed the robbery.  Now, among the exceptionally rough population of the town there were possibly fifty men who would not have hesitated to strike down Mr. Shackford if he had caught them flagrante delicto and resisted them, or attempted to call for succor.  That the crime was committed by some one in Stillwater or in the neighborhood Mr. Taggett had never doubted since the day of his arrival.  The clumsy manner in which the staple had been wrenched from the scullery door showed the absence of a professional hand.  Then the fact that the deceased was in the habit of keeping money in his bedchamber was a fact well known in the village, and not likely to be known outside of it, though of course it might have been.  It was clearly necessary for Mr. Taggett to carry his investigation into the workshops and among the haunts of the class which was indubitably to furnish him with the individual he wanted.  Above all, it was necessary that the investigation should be secret.  An obstacle obtruded itself here:  everybody in Stillwater knew everybody, and a stranger appearing on the streets or dropping frequently into the tavern would not escape comment.

The man with the greatest facility for making the requisite searches would of course be some workman.  But a workman was the very agent not to be employed under the circumstances.  How many times, and by what strange fatality, had a guilty party been selected to shadow his own movements, or those of an accomplice!  No, Mr. Taggett must rely only on himself, and his plan forthwith matured.  Its execution, however, was delayed several days, the cooperation of Mr. Slocum and Mr. Richard Shackford being indispensable.

At this stage Richard went to New York, where his cousin had made extensive investments in real estate.  For a careful man, the late Mr. Shackford had allowed his affairs there to become strangely tangled.  The business would detain Richard a fortnight.