southwest of Stillwater. Mr. Taggett's arrival sent such a thrill of
expectancy through the village that Mr. Leonard Tappleton, whose
obsequies occurred this day, made his exit nearly unobserved. Yet
there was little in Mr. Taggett's physical aspect calculated to stir
either expectation or enthusiasm: a slender man of about twenty-six,
but not looking it, with overhanging brown mustache, sparse
side-whiskers, eyes of no definite color, and faintly accentuated
eyebrows. He spoke precisely, and with a certain unembarrassed
hesitation, as persons do who have two thoughts to one word,--if
there are such persons. You might have taken him for a physician, or
a journalist, or the secretary of an insurance company; but you would
never have supposed him the man who had disentangled the complicated
threads of the great Barnabee Bank defalcation.

Stillwater's confidence, which had risen into the nineties, fell
to zero at sight of him. "Is _that_ Taggett?" they asked. That
was Taggett; and presently his influence began to be felt like a
sea-turn. The three Dogberrys of the watch were dispatched on secret
missions, and within an hour it was ferreted out that a man in a cart
had been seen driving furiously up the turnpike the morning after the
murder. This was an agricultural district, the road led to a market
town, and teams going by in the early dawn were the rule and not the
exception; but on that especial morning a furiously driven cart was
significant. Jonathan Beers, who farmed the Jenks land, had heard the
wheels and caught an indistinct glimpse of the vehicle as he was
feeding the cattle, but with a reticence purely rustic had not been
moved to mention the circumstance before.

"Taggett has got a clew," said Stillwater under its breath.