Several things had happened since the afternoon when he had sat behind the sheltering window curtain in the writing-room of the summer-resort hotel listening to Miss Grierson's story. For one, Teller Johnson, of the Bayou State Security, had pleaded his inability to leave his post unless ordered to do so by the president: the cashier was sick and the bank was short-handed. For another, there had been a peppery protest entered by the good Doctor Bertie--transformed for the moment into an exasperated Doctor Bertie. If Broffin did not quit his annoying espionage upon the house in Lake Boulevard, and upon the visitors thereto, there was going to be trouble, and he, Doctor Bertie, would be the trouble-maker. For a third untoward thing, he had found that Wahaska as a community was beginning to look a little askance at him. The village consciousness which had made it so easy for him to find out all he wished to know about everybody was turning against him, and now, as it seemed, everybody was wishing to know more than he cared to tell about the past, present, and future concerns of one Matthew Broffin: in short, he was becoming a suspicious character. Broffin the pertinacious, again with an unlighted cigar between his teeth, was ruminating thoughtfully over these things when he came in sight of the closed gates and smokeless chimneys of the Foundry and Machine Works. Once more the scent had grown cold. Miss Grierson's story had seemed to clear Griswold--if anything short of a court acquittal could clear him; and in the peppery interview Doctor Farnham had told him plainly that, if Mr. Griswold were the object of his attentions, he was barking up the wrong tree; that Miss Farnham would, if necessary, go into court and testify that Mr. Griswold was not the man whom she had seen in the Bayou State Security. Also, Griswold was doing something for himself. It was he who had pulled Mr. Galbraith out of the lake little better than a dead man, and had brought him to life again; and now he was taking an active part in the foundry fight--about the last thing that might be expected of a man dodging the police. In spite of all these buffetings the man from Tennessee was only bruised; not beaten. It is possible to be convinced without evidence; to believe without being able to prove. Also, convincement may grow into certainty as the evidence to support it becomes altogether incertitude. Broffin was as sure now that Griswold was his man as he was of his own present inability to prove it. Which is to say that he had discounted Miss Farnham's refusal to help, and President Galbraith's refusal to remember; was discounting Miss Grierson's skilfully told story, and Griswold's breaking of all the criminal precedents by staying on in Wahaska after he had been warned. For Broffin made no doubt that the warning had been given, either by Miss Farnham or by Miss Grierson--or both.