"I told him the facts of our loss, and our situation; how the money and papers must have been taken out of our safe by some one who had obtained knowledge of the numbers of the permutation lock; and he asked at once, as you will do, about the clerks, my partners, and so forth, and said some one of them was the villain. But no matter for this now. We laid plans which failed; and he concluded that after all, it must be the work of some one in the office, but how to catch him, was the question; and I cannot think that any of my partners or my clerks is the man, for we have exhausted all schemes in trying to fix the crime on any of them, and failed signally." "Well, is that all you've got to tell me?" "No; I've not told you my story yet but in part. When shall I begin again?" "When you please; but first tell me, perhaps, about your partners, and your clerks, each by himself; who he is, how long he has been with you, and what his age, his habits,--all about him." So Mr. Redfield--(the reader understands always that assumed names are given in these narratives, where there exists a proper reason for so doing)--Mr. Redfield, as we will call him, went into a minute description of the men, each by himself, and I confess I was baffled. I said to him that it must be that some one of those was the guilty party, yet that nothing he had told me would allow me to suspect one of them for a moment; that my impression of the guilt of one of them was solely the result of the common-sense reflection that somebody who understood the safe-lock, with its numbers, must be the man who took the money and papers: that was all. And in fact I suppose it was, because the case at this point became so desperate, or difficult of solution, that I undertook it all; for if I could have hit upon some expedient which would seem to me likely to work out the problem, I should, in my state of mind at the time, have given Mr. Redfield the advantage of it, for a small counsel fee at most, and declined to go on; but it was just enough unsolvable at this point to vex me, and pique my pride. I did not wonder that the best detectives in Cincinnati had failed, for I could easily see that the scoundrels had only to keep these papers hid in some unsearchable spot, and exercise ordinary care--indeed be quite careless--and never be found out, unless their greed should at last betray them.