he man hurried away without giving the
porter time to see his face.

When the office was examined the next day everything was found in
perfect order, and a sum of 14,000 francs, hidden away behind some
papers, untouched. The safe had not been tampered with; there was, in
short, nothing unusual about the room except ten long matches that were
lying half burnt on the floor.

On hearing of the bailiff's disappearance and the mysterious visitor
to his office, the police, who were convinced that Gouffe had been the
victim of some criminal design, inquired closely into his habits, his
friends, his associates, men and women. But the one man who could have
breathed the name that would have set the police on the track of the
real culprits was, for reasons of his own, silent. The police examined
many persons, but without arriving at any useful result.

However, on August 15, in a thicket at the foot of a slope running down
from the road that passes through the district of Millery, about
ten miles from Lyons, a roadmender, attracted by a peculiar smell,
discovered the remains of what appeared to be a human body. They were
wrapped in a cloth, but so decomposed as to make identification almost
impossible. M. Goron, at that time head of the Parisian detective
police, believed them to be the remains of Gouffe, but a relative of the
missing man, whom he sent to Lyons, failed to identify them. Two days
after the discovery of the corpse, there were found near Millery the
broken fragments of a trunk, the lock of which fitted a key that had
been picked up near the body. A label on the trunk showed that it had
been dispatched from Paris to Lyons on July 27, 188--, but the final
figure of the date was obliterated. Reference to the books of the
railway company showed that on July 27, 1889, the day following the
disappearance of Gouffe, a trunk similar in size and weight to that
found near Millery had been sent from Paris to Lyons.

The judicial authorities at Lyons scouted the idea that either the
corpse or the trunk found at Millery had any connection with the
disappearance of Gouffe. When M. Goron, bent on following up what he
believed to be important clues, went himself to Lyons he found that
the remains, after being photographed, had been interred in the common
burying-ground. The young doctor who had made the autopsy produced
triumphantly some hair taken from the head of the corpse and showed M.
Goron that whilst Gouffe's hair was ad