All this made it tolerably clear that the robbery had not been committed at the bank before the package was intrusted to the two messengers; for no bank clerk would have made up so clumsy a package, and the paying-teller himself, had he been a party to the crime, would not have cut the label written by himself from the genuine package and pasted it on the bogus one; he would simply have written out another label, thus lessening the chances of detection. Furthermore, it was shown by testimony that during the short time between the sealing up of the package in the paying-teller's department and its delivery to Dominie Earle, who took it first, it was constantly under the observation of half a dozen bank employees; so that the work of cutting off the label and pasting it on the bogus package could scarcely have been accomplished then without detection. Earle and Crawford, the bank messengers, were submitted to repeated examinations; but their statements threw no light upon the mystery. Both stuck persistently to the same story, which was that neither had loosed his hold on the handle of the valise from the moment they left the bank until they had delivered the package through the window of the express company's money department. Accepting these statements as true, it was impossible that the package had been tampered with in this part of its journey; while the assumption that they were not true implied apparently a collusion between the two messengers, which was highly improbable, since Dominie Earle had been a servant of the bank for thirty-five years, and had never in that long term failed in his duty or done anything to arouse distrust. Before entering the bank's employ he had been a preacher, and his whole life seemed to have been one of simplicity and honest dealing. As for Crawford, who was, indeed, a new man, it was plain that if the Dominie told the truth, and had really kept his hold on the valise-handle all the way to the express company's window, his companion, honest or dishonest, would have had no opportunity to cut off the label, paste it on the bogus package, and make the substitution.