There were none of the usual evidences of crime in the robbery of the store. A skilled detective knows every thief within his jurisdiction, and their operations are to him familiar and easily recognized. The appearance of a forced door will indicate the man who burst it open. An experienced detective will trace a burglar by the manner of opening a door as readily as a bank teller will recognize the hand writing of one of his depositors. The size of the jemmy used, the manner in which it is applied, the place at which a house is entered, whether at the door, the window, the roof, or the cellar grating, are all so many unerring indications to the detectives of the burglars whose operations he traces. But in this case there was no burglary committed. It was simply murder and robbery. The murdered man had either opened the door of the wareroom, or the murderers opened the door with the keys taken from the gagged or insensible porter. The removal of the goods betokened the robbery. Gold, silver and platina to the value of three thousand dollars were taken away, but there were no traces or evidence of the burglars. A murdered man lay dead in the entry, a number of shelves stood empty against the wall, but neither clue nor trace, footprint nor finger mark, existed to aid or direct the detective's sagacity in his search. Detective Taggart knew this. He felt the difficulty of his situation, and he preserved the chisel as the first link of the evidence he was to forge and fasten into a chain of convicting proof. He took the chisel home. The trade mark could not guide him. Hundreds of the firm's chisels were weekly sold in the city, and the clue seemed losing its power, when a few figures on the back of the wrapping paper inclosing the chisel arrested Taggart's attention. These figures were evidently a calculation by a hardware dealer of the price of the tool, the reduction by a slow hand of the business trade mark into the simple value of the digits. To find the man who had made the memorandum on the back of the paper was the first step in detecting the murderer.
Mr. Taggart visited the hardware dealers one by one until he despaired of finding the one who sold the chisel. There was no evidence that the tool had been purchased in Philadelphia. New York, Pittsburg, Baltimore and Boston retail such chisels, and the probability of its purchase in St. Louis was as strong as the idea of its purchase here. But Taggart found the man who sold the chisel. A hardware dealer recognized the calculation on the wrapper, and remembered the man who had bought it. Two men, he said, came to the store. One was slender and tall, the other was short and stout, with a heavy black moustache and black hair. The latter bought the chisel. The pal stood in the background and said nothing.