While thus engaged an employé of the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway arrived with the intelligence that the station tool-house had been broken open and a hand-car taken therefrom. The operators on the line at Spencer to the north, and at Sioux Rapids to the south, were at once called up, but both protested that no hand-car had passed their station at any hour of the night. The mystery was solved half an hour later by the discovery of a broken hand-car at the crossing of the Rock Island and Minneapolis and St. Louis roads, one mile south of the town. It was evident that the robbers, fleeing on the car, had met with an accident and had been forced to abandon it. The clue was serviceable, however, in that it pointed out the direction of the miscreants' escape, and the officials at Marathon, Laurens, and Albert City--towns in the general line of flight--were promptly advised to be on the alert to intercept all suspicious characters and hold them till examined. At this juncture a young lady employed in the Spencer telephone exchange imparted the information that she had observed three nasty-looking strangers the night before eating a late supper at a Spencer restaurant. The restaurant proprietor corroborated this, and added that one of the men was of very dark complexion, and, in his judgment, was a mulatto. The wires were again resorted to and neighbouring officials given the fresh information. At nine o'clock on the morning of the robbery the marshals of every place within a radius of forty miles were in possession of the facts, and had trusted deputies guarding all approaches to their respective towns. Assuming it to be a fact that the robbery had been committed by two white men and one black man, who were now travelling on foot in a south-easterly direction, it seemed but a question of hours before they would be halted by some one of the representatives of the law. An hour passed by, then two, and a third. Not a word came from Marathon, the nearest town in the line of flight. It was impossible for the men to escape by train, as all depôts were under close surveillance; it was equally impossible to conceal themselves in a farming community so thickly inhabited as the one they were now traversing. It appeared inevitable, therefore, that their whereabouts must soon be reported. Just before noon a farmer living five miles east of Sioux Rapids drove into that town and, upon being questioned, stated that he had given three strangers breakfast less than an hour before. He stated that one was a negro, and that all three were well armed and were apparently desperate characters. Upon being informed that the trio had burglarized the Greenville Bank, the farmer was considerably surprised, but was able to give a minute description of the robbers to the marshal.