Broffin drew a deep breath and nodded slowly. The added details were fitting the new theory to a nicety. In conversation with the president he had previously marked the fact that the robber had claimed to be starving.
"Thank you, Mr. Johnson; I reckon that's all for this time," he said to the teller, and a minute later he was buying a cigar of the little Gascon proprietor of the restaurant next door to the bank.
"You have an excellent memory, I've been told, Monsieur Pouillard," he said, at the lighting of the cigar. "Do you recollect the day of the bank robbery next door pretty well?"
The Gascon shrugged amiably. "_Vraiment_, M'sieu' Broffin; it ees not possib' that one forgets."
"It was rather late for breakfast, and not quite late enough for lunch: were you feeding many people just then?"
"H-onlee one; he is yo'ng man w'at don' nevveh come on my 'otel biffo'. He is sit on dat secon' table; _oui_!"
Broffin pushed the probe of inquiry a little deeper. How did M. Pouillard happen to remember? _Mais_, it was because the young man was very droll; he was of the cold blood. When Victor, _le garçon_, would have brought news of the _émeute_, he had said, breakfast first, and the news afterward.
Questioned in his turn, the serving-man corroborated his employer's particulars and was able to add a few of his own. The young man was fair, with blue eyes and a reddish beard and mustaches. The mustaches were untrimmed, but the beard was clipped to a point, _à les moeurs des étudiants des Beaux Arts_. The waiter had once served tables in a Paris café, and he seldom lost an opportunity of advertising the fact. Pressed to account for his accurate memory picture of a chance patron, he confessed naïvely; the tip had been princely and the young man was one to mark and to remember--and to serve again.
Broffin left the restaurant with one more link in the chain neatly forged. There was an excellent reason why none of the first-aid pursuers had been able to catch a glimpse of the "strong-arm man." He had merely stepped from the bank entrance to Monsieur Pouillard's. Between the café breakfast and the departure of the _Belle Julie_ there lay an hour and a quarter. In that interval he could easily perfect his simple disguise. Broffin was not specially interested in the incidental minutiæ. It was the identity of the man with the untrimmed mustaches and the pointed beard that must be established.