and desperate criminal; in fact,
M. Lepine considered the matter so important that he cabled next day
that he was sending Inspector Pigot to New York to investigate the
affair further, and to confer with our bureau as to the best methods
to be taken to apprehend the murderer. Inspector Pigot, it was added,
would sail at once for Havre on _La Savoie._

Meanwhile, Grady's men, with Simmonds at their head, strained every
nerve to discover the whereabouts of the fugitive; a net was thrown
over the entire city, but, while a number of fish were captured, the
one which the police particularly wished for was not among them. Not
a single trace of the fugitive was discovered; he had vanished
absolutely, and, after a day or two, Grady asserted confidently that
he had left New York.

For Grady had come back into the case again, goaded by the papers,
particularly by the _Record_, to efforts which he must have
considered superhuman. The remarkable nature of the mystery, its
picturesque and unique features, the fact that three men had been
killed within a few days in precisely the same manner, and the
absence of any reasonable hypothesis to explain these deaths--all
this served to rivet public attention. Every amateur detective in the
country had a theory to exploit--and far-fetched enough most of them
were!

Grady did a lot of talking in those days, explaining in detail the
remarkable measures he was taking to capture the criminal; but the
fact remained that three men had been killed, and that no one had
been punished; that a series of crimes had been committed, and that
the criminal was still at large, and seemed likely to remain so; and,
naturally enough, the papers, having exhausted every other phase of
the case, were soon echoing public sentiment that something was wrong
somewhere, and that the detective bureau needed an overhauling,
beginning at the top.

The Boule cabinet remained locked up in a cell at the Twenty-third
Street station; and Simmonds kept the key in his pocket. I know now
that he was as much in the dark concerning the cabinet as the general
public was; and the general public was very much in the dark indeed,
for the cabinet had not figured in the accounts of the first two
tragedies at all, and only incidentally in the reports of the latest
one. As far as it was concerned, the affair seemed clear enough to
most of the reporters, as an attempt to smuggle into the country an
art object of great value. Such cas