The robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank was already an old story when Mr. Matthew Broffin, chief of the New Orleans branch of a notable detective agency, returned from Guatemala with the forger Mortsen as his travelling companion.
Broffin was a successful man in his calling. Beginning as a deputy marshal in the "moonshining" districts of Kentucky and Tennessee, he had shifted first to the Secret Service, and later to the more highly specialized ranks of the private agencies. With nothing very spectacular to his credit, he had earned repute as a follower of long trails, and as an acute unraveller of tangled clews. Hence, his docket was never empty.
It was not altogether for the sake of the reward that he took over the case of the bank robbery a few days after his return from Central America. As a matter of fact, there was an express-company case waiting which promised more money. But emulation counts for something, even in the thief-catching field; and since two members of his own staff had fired and missed their mark in St. Louis, there was a blunder to be retrieved.
Reasoning logically upon the new problem, Broffin did not at once try to take up the chase at the point to which it had been carried by the two who had failed. Since the man had disappeared, the first necessity was the establishing of his true identity, and for a week Broffin devoted himself to the task of disentangling the two personalities: that of the decently dressed, parlor-anarchist bank-raider, and that of the man who figured in the anonymous letter as Gavitt, the deck-hand.
At the end of the week two facts were sufficiently apparent. The first was that there had been a real John Gavitt, a consumptive roustabout on the New Orleans river-front; a person easily traceable up to the time of his disappearance on or about the day of the robbery, and whose description, gathered from those who had known him well, tallied not at all with the best obtainable word-picture of the bank-robber. Fact the second was a corollary of the first: by some means the robber had contrived to change places with Gavitt; to take his place in the _Belle Julie's_ crew and to assume his name.
Broffin called this step in the outworking of his problem an incident closed when he had wired the post-master of the little Iowa river town from which the true Gavitt had migrated, and had received the expected reply. John Wesley Gavitt had reached home two days after the date of the bank robbery, had died within the week, and had been buried beside his wife.