The Camp Fire Girls Solve a Mystery; Or, The Christmas Adventure at Carver House

Nyoda turned the page and read the brief entry:

“I have taken up the study of ancient history as a serious pursuit. In it I hope to find forgetfulness.”

The eyes of the Winnebagos traveled to the bookcase, and now they knew why there was nothing there but dull old books in heavy bindings, and why Uncle Jasper Carver hated love stories.

The next entry had them all sitting up again.

“I have had Hercules fasten an iron shutter over the window in my study—the one through which I can see Tad’s house when I sit at my desk. I cannot bear to look at anything that reminds me of him.”

“There!” shouted all the Winnebagos at once. “That was the reason for putting up the iron shutter! The mystery is solved!”

“Poor Uncle Jasper!” said Nyoda pityingly. “What a Spartan he was! How thoroughly he set about removing every memory of Tad from his mind! Think of covering up that beautiful pane of glass because he couldn’t bear to look through it at the house of his friend!” She finished reading the entry:

“Hercules demurred at covering up the window—he admired it more than anything else in the house—so to give him a satisfactory reason for doing so I told him the devil would come in through that gateway some day and I was putting up the shutter to keep him out. There’s one thing sure; Hercules will never take that shutter down as long as he lives—he’s scared nearly into a Chinaman.”

“So that’s why Hercules threw such a fit when we took the shutter off!” said Sherry. “He thought that now the devil would come in and get him. Poor, superstitious old nigger!”

“I wonder if Tad and Sylvia went to live in the house on Harrisburg Hill,” said Sahwah curiously. “He doesn’t say whether they did or not.”

“Oh, I wonder if they did!” cried Sylvia, with eager interest. “To think I’ve been living in the same house they lived in—if they did live there,” she added. “But how strange it seems to hear them call that place Harrisburg Hill. It is called Main Street Hill now.”

“I wonder what Tad and Sylvia did after they were married,” said Hinpoha, with romantic curiosity. “Did they stay in Oakwood, or did they go away? Is there any more, Nyoda?”

Nyoda was already glancing down the next page, which was written over with lines in blacker ink, and broader and heavier strokes of the pen, which seemed somehow to express grim satisfaction on the part of Uncle Jasper. Grim satisfaction Uncle Jasper must indeed have felt when he wrote those lines, for misfortune had overtaken the one who had caused his own anguish of heart. The entry told how Tad had become staff physician at one of the large army posts in the west. There was an epidemic of typhoid and quite a few of the men were ill at once, all requiring the same kind of medicine. Through carelessness in making up a certain medicine he put in a deadly poison instead of the harmless ingredient he intended to put in, and a dozen men died of the dose. There was a tremendous stir about the matter, and the newspapers all over the country were full of it. He was court-martialed, and though he was acquitted, the mistake being entirely accidental, the matter had gained such publicity that his career as a doctor was ruined. He left the army and fled out of the country, taking Sylvia with him. Some months later the papers brought the announcement of both their deaths from yellow fever in Cuba. Again the handwriting began to waver on the last sentence. “She is dead.” In those three little words the Winnebagos seemed to hear the echo of the breaking of a strong man’s heart. There were no more entries.

“Isn’t it perfectly thrilling!” gulped Hinpoha, with eyes overflowing again. “It’s better than any book I ever read! And to think we never suspected there was anything like that connected with your Uncle Jasper! There, now, Katherine Adams, what did I tell you? You said he was a born bachelor, and just look at the romance he had!”

“He certainly did,” said Katherine, in a tone of surrender.

“That must be why the house we lived in was shut up so long,” said Sylvia musingly. “The man that said we could live in it said that old Mrs. Phillips had moved away many years ago and had never come back, and although people knew she was dead, no one had ever come to live in the house, and nobody in Oakwood knew who owned it. The man said he had heard from older people in the town that Mrs. Phillips had had a son who was away from home all the time after he was grown up and who had gotten into some kind of trouble—he couldn’t remember what it was. This must have been it! How queer it is, that I should first come to live in Tad’s house, and then stay in the house of his friend! I never dreamed, when I heard that man telling Aunt Aggie about the almost forgotten people that used to live in the old house, that I should ever hear of them again. Things have turned out to be so interesting since I came to stay in the Winter Palace!” she finished up with sparkling eyes.

Darkness had fallen by the time Nyoda had finished reading Uncle Jasper’s Diary, and she jumped up with a little exclamation as the clock on the mantel-piece chimed six. The other hours had struck unnoticed. “Mercy!” she cried, “it’s time dinner was on the table, and here we haven’t even begun to get it! I forgot all about dinner, thinking about poor Uncle Jasper.”

All the rest had forgotten about dinner, too, and the Winnebagos could not get their minds off the tale they had just heard read. “Poor Uncle Jasper!” they all said, looking up at his picture, and to their pitying eyes his face was no longer grim and stern, but only pathetic.

CHAPTER VII
SYLVIA’S STORY

“Katherine Adams, whatever has happened to you?” asked Gladys suddenly, meeting her under the bright light in the hall that evening after dinner.

“Why?” asked Katherine, looking startled. “Is there any soot on my face?”

“No,” replied Gladys with a peal of laughter, “I didn’t mean anything like that. I meant that you look different from the way you used to look, that’s all. You’ve changed since the days when I first knew you. What have you done to yourself in the last year? You’re the same old Katherine, of course, but you’re different, somehow. I noticed it when you first came to Brownell last fall, but I’ve been too busy to give it much thought. But since we’ve been here I’ve been watching you and I can’t help noticing the difference. Now stand right there under that light and let me look at you.”

Katherine laughed good humoredly and stood still dutifully while Gladys inspected her with appraising eyes that took in all the little improvements in Katherine’s appearance. She was heavier than she used to be; some of her angles were softened into curves. She now stood erect, with her head up and her shoulders thrown back, which made her look several inches taller. Her hair no longer hung about her face in stringy wisps; the loose ends were curled becomingly around her temples and ears and held in place with invisible hairpins. She wore a trim worsted dress of an odd shade of blue, which was just the right shade to go with her dull blonde hair and with the dark brown of her neat shoes. Her knuckles were no longer red and rough; her fingernails were manicured; the sagging spectacles of the old days had given way to intellectual looking nose glasses with narrow tortoise shell rims.

“Well, what’s the verdict?” asked Katherine, smiling broadly at Gladys.

“You’re wonderful!” said Gladys enthusiastically. “You’re actually stunning! Whoever told you to get that particular shade of blue to bring out the color of your hair?”

“Nobody told me,” answered Katherine. “I bought it because it was a bargain.” But there was a knowing twinkle in her eyes which gave her dead away, and Gladys, seeing it, knew that Katherine had at last achieved that pride of appearance which she had struggled so long to instill into her.

“However did you do it?” she murmured.

“It was your eleven Rules of Neatness that did it,” replied Katherine, laughing, “or was it seven? I forget. But I did do just the things you told me to do, and it worked. There is no longer any danger of my coming apart in public! What a trial I used to be to you, though!” she said, flushing a little at the recollection. “How you ever put up with me I don’t know. How did you stand it, anyway?”

“Because we loved you, sweet child,” replied Gladys fondly, “and because we all believed the motto, ‘While there’s life, there’s hope.’ We knew you would be a paragon of neatness some day as soon as you got around to it. You never could think of more than one thing at a time, Katherine dear!”

“O my, O my, look at them hugging each other!” exclaimed a teasing voice from above. Looking up they saw Justice Dalrymple leaning over the banisters at the head of the stairs. “You never do that to me,” he continued in a plaintive tone.

Katherine and Gladys merely laughed at him and walked on, arm in arm, and Justice came down the stairs wringing mock tears out of his handkerchief and singing mournfully,

“Do behave yourself, Justice,” said Katherine with mock severity. “If you disgrace me I’ll never get you invited anywhere again. Why can’t you be good like the other two boys?”

“’Cause I’m a Junebug,” warbled Justice, to the tune of “I’m a Pilgrim,”

He advanced into the drawing room, where Katherine now stood alone, and drew out the last syllable of his absurd song into a long bleating wail that sent her into convulsions of laughter till the tears rolled down her cheeks.

began Justice, picking up a vase from the table and holding it under her eyes, and then he stopped, as if struck by a sudden recollection. “I said that to you once before,” he said, “don’t you remember? The first time we really got acquainted with each other. You were standing by the stove, weeping into the apple sauce.”

“It was pudding,” Katherine corrected him, with a little shamefaced laugh at the remembrance, “huckleberry pudding. And I streaked it all over my face and you nearly died laughing.”

“Well, you laughed too,” Justice defended himself, “and that’s how we got to be friends.”

“That seems ages ago,” said Katherine, “and yet it’s only a little over a year. What a year that was!”

Both stopped their bantering and looked at each other with sober eyes, each thinking of what the trying year at Spencer had been to them. Justice’s eyes traveled over Katherine, and he, too, noticed that she was much better looking than when he first knew her. Katherine noticed the admiration dawning in his eyes and divined his thoughts. After Gladys’s spontaneous outburst of approval she knew beyond any doubt that her appearance no longer offended the artistic eye. The knowledge gave her a new confidence in herself, and a thrill of pleasure that she had never experienced before went through her like an electric shock. At last people had ceased to look upon her as a cross between a circus and a lunatic asylum, she told herself exultingly.

“Well, what are you thinking about?” she asked finally, as Justice continued silent.

“I was just thinking,” replied Justice gravely, “about the difference in plumage that different climates bring about.”

“Whatever made you think about birds?” asked Katherine wonderingly. “You jump from one subject to another like a flea. I don’t see how you can keep your mind on your work long enough to invent anything. By the way, how is that thingummy of yours going? You’re as mum as an oyster about it.”

“Pretty well,” replied Justice. “I’m hampered though, by not having the right kind of help, and not being able to get some of the things I need.”

Katherine looked at him scrutinizingly. He looked tired and rather worn. The nonsensical boy had vanished and a man stood in his place, a man with a heavy responsibility on his shoulders. Justice had that way of changing all in an instant from a boy to a man. At times he would go frolicking about the house till you would have sworn he was not a day older than Slim and the Captain; an instant later he was all gravity, and looked every day of his twenty-six years.

Katherine always stood in awe of him whenever that change took place. He seemed so old and wise and experienced then that she felt hopelessly ignorant and childish beside him. She liked him best when he seemed like the other boys.

“What do you think of my Winnebagos?” she asked him, leading him away from the subject of his work. He always got old looking when he talked about it.

“Greatest bunch of girls I ever saw,” he replied heartily. “Never came across such an accomplished lot in all my life. Each one’s more fun than the next. Hinpoha’s a beauty, and Gladys is a dainty fairy, and Sahwah looks like a brown thrush, and Migwan’s a regular Madonna. And, say—would you mind telling me how you do it, anyway?”

“Do what?”

“Stick together like that. I thought girls always squabbled among themselves. I never thought they could do things together the way you girls do.”

“Camp Fire Girls can do things together!” Katherine informed him with emphasis. “You boys think you’re the only ones that know anything about teamwork. Teamwork is our first motto.”

“I guess it must be,” admitted Justice. “You certainly are a team.”

The rest of the “team” came in then, Sahwah and Gladys and Hinpoha, all three arm in arm, and Migwan behind them, pushing Sylvia in her rolling chair. They settled in a circle before the fireplace, and the talk soon drifted around to Uncle Jasper and his blighted romance. Indeed, Hinpoha had done nothing but talk about it all during dinner. Sylvia, too, was completely taken up with it.

“I love Sylvia Warrington!” she exclaimed fervently. “I am going to have her for my Beloved. I’m glad she had black hair. I adore black hair. And I’m so glad my name is Sylvia, too. I’ve been pretending that she was my aunt, and that I was named after her. I’ve been pretending, too, that she taught me to sing, ‘Hark, hark, the lark!’ Now, when I sing it I always think of her. Wasn’t it beautiful, what Uncle Jasper said about her? ‘She is like a lark, singing in the desert at dawning!’ Oh, I can see it all, the desert, and the sun coming up, and the lark soaring up and singing. I just can’t breathe, it’s so beautiful. And my Beloved is like that!”

A radiant dream light came into her eyes, and she seemed suddenly to have traveled far away from the group by the fire and to be wandering in some far-off land.

“Sylvia is a beautiful name,” said Katherine. “For whom are you called? Was your mother’s name Sylvia?” It was the first time any of them had spoken of Sylvia’s mother, who they knew must be dead.

Sylvia’s eyes lost their dreaminess and she looked up with a merry smile.

“I made it up myself,” she said. “I don’t know what my first real name was, but when Aunt Aggie got me she named me Aggie, after herself. But Aggie is such a hopelessly unimaginative sort of name. It doesn’t make you think of a thing when you say it. You might just as well be named ‘Empty’ as ‘Aggie.’ Then once we lived in the same house with a lady who sang, and she used to sing, ‘Who is Sylvia?’ It was the most tuneful name I’d ever heard, and I wondered and wondered who Sylvia was. But I guess the lady never found out, because she kept right on singing, ‘Who is Sylvia?’ So one day I said to myself, ‘I’ll be Sylvia!’ Don’t you think it’s a fragrant name? When I say it I can see festoons of pink rosebuds tied with baby ribbon. I made people call me Sylvia, and that’s been my name ever since.”

“Oh, you funny child!” said Nyoda, joining in the general laugh at Sylvia’s tale of her name.

“But Sylvia,” said Sahwah wonderingly, “you said you didn’t know what your first real name was before you came to live with your aunt. Didn’t your aunt know it?”

“No,” replied Sylvia. “You see,” she continued, “Aunt Aggie isn’t my real aunt. She adopted me when I was a baby.”

“Oh-h!” said the Winnebagos in surprise.

“But why do you call her ‘aunt’?” asked Sahwah. “Why don’t you call her ‘mother’?”

“She never would have it,” replied Sylvia. “She always taught me to call her Aunt Aggie. I don’t know why.”

Sylvia moved restlessly in her chair, and from the folds of the loose dressing gown which she wore a picture tumbled out. Katherine picked it up and laid it back on her lap. It was a small colored poster sketch of a red haired girl in a golf cape, which had evidently been the cover design of a magazine some years ago.

“Why are you so fond of that poster, Sylvia?” asked Katherine curiously. “You brought it along with you when you came here, and you keep it with you all the time.”

Sylvia’s tone when she answered was half humorous and half wistful. “That’s my mother,” she said.

“Your mother!” exclaimed Katherine, incredulously.

“Oh, not my really real mother,” Sylvia continued quickly. “I never saw a picture of her. But Aunt Aggie said my mother had red hair and was most uncommonly good looking, so I found a picture of a beautiful lady with red hair and called it my mother. It’s better than nothing.” The Winnebagos nodded silently and no one spoke for a moment.

Then Katherine asked gently, “What else do you know about mother?”

Sylvia sat up and related the tale told her hundreds of times by Aunt Aggie, in answer to her eager questioning about her mother. Unconsciously she used Aunt Aggie’s expressions and gestures as she told it.

“‘Me an’ Joe was coming on the steam cars from Butler to Philadelphy, and in back of us sat a young couple with a baby about a month old. The girl—she wasn’t nothing but a girl even though she was a married woman—was most uncommon good looking. She had bright red hair and big grey eyes, and she wore a golf cape. Her husband was a big, red faced feller, homely but real honest lookin’. They weren’t either of them twenty years old. Farmers, I could tell from their talk, and as well as I could make out, the name on their bag was Mitchell. Well, well, along between Waterloo and Poland there suddenly come a terrible bump, and then a smash and a crash, and the next thing I was layin’ under the seat and Joe was trying to pull me out. When I did finally get out the car was a-layin’ over on its side all smashed to bits. Somehow or other when Joe dug me out from under the seat I had ahold of the little baby that had been in the seat in back of me. The young man and woman were under the wreck. They were both killed, but the baby never had a scratch.

“‘Nobody ever found out who the red headed woman and the man were, because they were all burned up in the wreck, and all their luggage.

“‘I had taken care of the baby, thinkin’ I’d keep her until her people were found, but they were never heard from, so I decided to keep her for my own. That baby was you, Sylvia.’

“So that’s all I know about my mother and father,” finished Sylvia with a sigh. “But I can think up the most dazzling things about them!”

“Sylvia,” said Katherine, “who was the man I saw on the stairs of your house the night I came in and found you?”

Sylvia looked at her in wonder. “What man?”

“When I came into the hall there was a man leaning over the banisters about half way up the stairs. When I came in he ran down the stairs and out of the front door.”

“I can’t imagine,” said Sylvia. “No man ever came to the house to see us. I didn’t hear anybody come in that day.”

“But the front door stood open when I came up on the porch,” said Katherine. “That hadn’t been standing open all day, had it?”

“No,” replied Sylvia, “for Aunt Aggie was always careful about closing it when she went out.”

“Then he must have opened it,” said Katherine.

“How queer!” said Sylvia. “What do you suppose he could have been doing there? He never knocked on the inside door.”

“Possibly he thought the house was empty, and went in to get out of the cold,” concluded Katherine. “Then he heard you singing, and it scared him. He looked frightened out of his wits when I saw him. When I came in he just ran for his life.” Katherine laughed as she remembered her own dismay at seeing the man and thinking that he was the owner of the house, when he was only a stray visitor himself and worse frightened than she. Here she had prepared such an elaborate apology in her mind, and he was nothing but a tramp! The humor of it struck her forcibly, now that it was all in the past, and she laughed over it most of the evening.

About nine o’clock Hercules came shuffling in, suffering from a bad cold, and asked Nyoda to give him something for it. While Nyoda went upstairs to the medicine chest Sahwah craftily asked the old man, “Hercules, did you ever hear of there being a secret passage in this house?”

Hercules gave a visible start. “Whyfor you ask dat?” he demanded.

“Oh, for no special reason,” said Sahwah casually. “I just thought maybe there was one and that you might know about it. There always is one in these old houses, you know.”

“Well, dere ain’t in dis!” answered the old man vehemently, and at the same time looking relieved. “Marse Jasper he always useter say to me, ‘Herc’les,’ he useter say, ‘dere’s one good thing about dis house, and dat is it ain’t cluttered up wif no secrut passidges.’ Secrut passidges am powerful unlucky, Mis’ Sahwah. Onct I knew a man dat lived in a house dat had a secrut passidge an’ one night de ole debbil got in th’u dat secrut passidge an’ run off wif him! Don’ you go huntin’ no secrut passidges, Mis’ Sahwah, if you knows what’s good fer you. Dey suttinly am powerful unlucky!”

Nyoda came down stairs and bore Hercules off to the kitchen, and the Winnebagos and the boys had their laugh out behind his back. “How can he tell such fibs in such a truthful sounding way!” remarked Justice. “If I didn’t know about that passage from Uncle Jasper’s diary I’d be inclined to believe every word he said. But I bet the old sinner knows all about it, just as Uncle Jasper did. Even if he doesn’t, how can he invent such convincing speeches on the part of Uncle Jasper out of the empty air? He’s the most engaging old fibber I ever came across.”

Nyoda came back and bore Sylvia off to bed and then she returned to the library. “Sherry,” she said thoughtfully, leaning her chin in her hand, “Dr. Crosby was here this morning to return those binoculars he borrowed the other day, and I talked to him about Sylvia. He said he had once been called in to treat her for tonsilitis when she lived in Millvale, and had examined her spine at the time. He said it was a splintered vertebra and it could be fixed by grafting in a piece of bone. They’re doing wonders now that way. He said Dr. Gilbert, the famous specialist, could perform an operation that would cure her. He hadn’t had a chance to talk it over with Sylvia’s aunt because he had been called away suddenly and when he returned to town the Deane’s were gone. He had no idea what had become of them. He only made a hasty examination, but he is positive she can be cured. I know the Deane’s can’t afford to pay for such an operation, but Dr. Crosby said he was sure he could persuade Dr. Gilbert to perform it free, in his clinic. I told Dr. Crosby to bring Dr. Gilbert to Oakwood as soon as he could. He said he thought it would be possible soon. I thought as long as we are going to keep Sylvia in our care until her aunt is well again we might as well have her fixed up in the meantime. I would like to have the operation over before her aunt knows anything about it, say the first week of the new year. What do you think?”

“Whew!” whistled Sherry, looking at his wife in astonishment. The rapidity with which Nyoda got a project under way was a nine days’ wonder to Sherry, who usually spent more time in deliberating a course of action than she did in carrying it out. “Go ahead!” was all he could say.

The Winnebagos gave long exclamations of joy. It had never occurred to them that anything could be done for Sylvia.

“Does she know it?” asked Hinpoha.

“Not yet,” replied Nyoda. “I thought we would keep it for a birthday surprise. Her birthday is the twenty-ninth. I’ll have Dr. Gilbert come that day and let him tell her himself. Don’t anybody mention it to her until then.”

“We won’t,” promised the Winnebagos, and trooped off to bed, heavy with their delicious secret.

CHAPTER VIII
THE FOOTPRINTS ON THE STAIRS

The Winnebagos woke bright and early the next morning, eager to begin the search for the secret passage again, but whatever plans they had formed were driven entirely out of their minds by the appearance of the footprints on the stairs. Nyoda discovered them first when she raised the curtains on the stair landing on her way down to bring in the morning paper.

The day before, in anticipation of the coming of the men from the second hand store to remove the discarded furniture from Uncle Jasper’s study, she had improvised a runner to cover the front stairs to keep them from being scratched. The stretch from the upstairs to the landing she had covered with a strip of rag carpet, and from the landing down she had used a length of white canvas. The landing itself was still bare, as she had not yet found the old rug she intended laying there.

Now, as she came downstairs, she noticed, on the strip of white canvas that covered the bottom half of the stairs, three dark red footprints. On the white background they stood out with startling distinctness. They began on the third step from the top and appeared on every other step from then on to the bottom. All three were the prints of a right foot. No heel marks were visible, only the upper half of the foot. From the direction which they pointed they were made by a person descending the stairs, and from their size that person was a man.

Nyoda’s first thought that Sherry had cut his foot and had gone downstairs, leaving a bloody trail on her stair runner, and full of concern she immediately sought him. But her search revealed him down in the basement, coaxing up the furnace, and there was nothing the matter with his feet. The Captain was with him and he likewise disclaimed a cut foot. The two of them had come down the back stairs. Nyoda hurried back upstairs. Justice and Slim were in the upper hall when she came up, just in the act of coming down.

“Good morning!” they both called out in cheery greeting.

“Which one of you has the cut foot?” she asked.

“Cut foot? Not I,” said Justice.

“Nor I,” said Slim. “Did somebody cut his foot?”

“Look,” said Nyoda, pointing to the marks on the lower steps.

“It must have been your husband, or the Captain,” said Justice. “It wasn’t either of us.”

“It wasn’t either of them,” replied Nyoda. “I asked them. They’re down in the basement fussing with the furnace.”

“It’s the print of a foot with a shoe on,” said Justice, examining the marks.

“Somebody must have gotten into the house last night!” exclaimed Nyoda in a startled tone. “Sherry,” she called, “come up here!”

Sherry came up from the basement on the run, for he recognized something out of the ordinary in his wife’s tone, and the Captain came hard on his heels. The girls came running down from above to see what the commotion was about, and the whole household stood staring at the mysterious footprints in startled bewilderment.

“Burglars!” cried Hinpoha with a little shriek.

“Oh, my silverware!” exclaimed Nyoda in a stricken tone, and raced into the dining room. She pulled open the sideboard drawers with trembling hands, expecting to find them ransacked, but nothing was amiss. Every piece was still in its place. Neither had the sterling silver candlesticks on top of the sideboard been disturbed. A thorough search through the house revealed nothing missing. Various gold bracelets and watches lay in plain sight on dressers, and Hinpoha’s gold mesh bag hung on the back of a chair beside her bed. Sherry reported no money gone.

Nothing stolen! Who had entered the house then, if not a burglar? The thing had resolved itself into a mystery, and everyone looked at his neighbor with puzzled eyes. Breakfast was completely forgotten.

“What gets me,” said Sherry, “is where those footprints started from. By the way they point, the man was going downstairs, but they begin in the middle of the stairway. Clearly he didn’t start at the top. Do you suppose he came in through the landing window?”

He examined the triple window on the landing closely, but soon looked around with a puzzled expression on his face.

“The windows are all fastened from the inside,” he reported, “and there’s no sign of their having been tampered with. It doesn’t look as though anyone could have come in this way.” He examined all the rest of the windows on the first floor, and found them all latched and their latches undisturbed. The doors, too, were locked from the inside. The cellar windows had a heavy screening over them on the outside which could not be removed without being destroyed, and this screening was everywhere intact.

“He must have come in through one of the upstairs windows after all,” said Nyoda. “There were about a dozen open in the various bedrooms. The window in the room Hinpoha and Gladys sleep in is directly over the front porch.”

Hinpoha and Gladys gave a simultaneous shriek at the thought of the mysterious intruder coming through their room while they lay sleeping.

“But if he came down from upstairs, why aren’t the footprints all the way down, instead of beginning in the middle?” insisted Katherine. “He couldn’t have come down from upstairs; he must have come in through this window on the landing,” she said decidedly, going up to the window and looking it over sharply for any sign of having been opened, and, by shaking the wooden framework of the little square panes vigorously, as if she would shake the truth out of it by force.

The window, however, still yielded no sign of having been opened, and the sill outside bore no marks of an instrument. The mystery grew deeper. How could those footprints have started under the landing window if the feet that made them did not enter by that window?

“Maybe he did come from upstairs after all,” said Sahwah, whose lively brain had been working hard on the puzzle, “but his foot didn’t begin to bleed until he was half way down. Maybe he hurt it on the landing.”

“Sat down to trim his toe-nails and cut his toe off, probably,” suggested Justice, and the girls giggled hysterically.

Striking an attitude in imitation of a story book detective, Justice began to address the group. “Gentlemen of the jury,” he began, “we have here a mystery which has baffled the brightest minds in the country, but unraveling it has been the merest child’s play to a great detective like myself. Here are the facts in the case. A man goes down a stairway. The first half of his descent is shrouded in oblivion; half way down he begins to leave bloody footprints. There is only one answer, gentlemen; the one which occurred to me immediately. It is this: Upon reaching the landing the mysterious descender suddenly remembers that it is the day on which he annually trims his toe-nails. Being a very methodical man, as I can detect by the way his feet point when he goes downstairs, he sits down and does it then and there. But the knife slips and he cuts off his toe, after which he makes bloody footprints on the rest of the stairs.”

“Justice Dalrymple, you awful boy!” exclaimed Katherine, and then she laughed with the rest at his absurd explanation of the mystery.

“Well, can you think up any argument that disproves my theory?” he retorted calmly.

“I can,” replied the Captain. “If your theory was correct we’d have found the toe lying on the stairs.”

The girls shrieked and covered their ears with their hands. The Captain chuckled wickedly, but said no more.

“I can think up another argument,” said Sahwah. “Your man went barefoot after he cut his toe off, but this one had his shoe on.”

“So he did!” admitted Justice. “Now you’ve ‘done upsot my whole theory!’”

“But how could his foot bleed through his shoe?” asked Katherine skeptically.

“The sole must have been cut through,” said Justice. “He probably wore a rubber-soled shoe, like a sneaker, and stepped on some broken glass that went right through the sole into his foot. I did the same thing myself once. It bled through, all right.”

“But what did he step on?” asked Nyoda, puzzled. “There isn’t any sign of broken glass around.”

“I give it up,” said Sherry, who could make nothing from the facts before him and had no imagination to help him supply missing details. “The man undoubtedly got in through the upstairs window and out the same way. He was a burglar, only he got scared away before he could steal anything. Some noise in the house, probably.”

“He must have heard Slim snoring, and thought it was a bombing plane coming after him,” said Justice, and then dodged nimbly as Slim made a pass at his head with a menacing hand.

“Whatever he did to his foot fixed him,” said Sherry. “He called it a day when that happened and went off without making a haul. Probably had a pal outside in a machine.”

“Nyoda,” said Sahwah, struck with a sudden thought, “do you think it could have been Hercules? He might have come in for something in the night.”

“Of course!” exclaimed Nyoda. “Why didn’t I think of that before? Hercules has a key to the back door. How idiotic of me not to have guessed before that it was Hercules. Here we stand looking at these footprints like Robinson Crusoe looking at Friday’s, and talking about burglars, and wracking our brains wondering where he came in, and it must have been Hercules all the while. He cut his foot and came in to get something for it, or he came in to get something more for his cold and cut his foot after he got in. Poor old Hercules! He wouldn’t even wake us up to get help. I’ll go right out and find out what happened to him.”

She started for the back door, but before she had reached the kitchen there was a stamping of feet on the back doorstep, a tapping on the door, and then Hercules opened it himself and came in, as was his custom.

“Mawnin’, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he quavered genially, smiling a broad, toothless smile at the sight of her. “Mighty nippy dis mawnin’.” He shivered and stamped his feet on the floor, edging over toward the stove.

Nyoda looked down at his feet hastily and instantly realized that it was not he who had left the print on the stairs. The loose, flapping felt slippers which Hercules invariably wore, bursting out on all sides, would have left a mark twice the size of the mysterious footprints. Nobody knew just how big Hercules’ feet were. He owned to wearing a size twelve, at which Sherry openly scoffed.

“I’ll bet a size fifteen could hurt him,” he declared.

The rest also saw at a glance that there was no possibility of Hercules having made the footprints.

Hercules, unconscious of the charged atmosphere of the house, looked around for the breakfast which should be set out for him on the end of the kitchen table at this hour.

“You-all overslep’?” he inquired good-temperedly of Nyoda.

“No, we didn’t,” replied Nyoda. “We’ve had a little excitement this morning and forgot all about breakfast. Somebody got into the house last night.”

“Burglars?” asked Hercules anxiously. “Did anything get stole?”

“No,” replied Nyoda, “nothing was stolen, but the burglar left some bloody footprints on the stair runner. We thought at first it might have been you, coming to get something for your cold, but I see now that it is impossible for you to have left the footprints. You didn’t come into the house last night, did you?” she finished.

“No’m,” answered Hercules with simple directness. “I done slep’ like a top, Miss’ ’Lizbeth. Took dat hot drink you-all gave me to take, an’ never woke up till de sun starts shinin’ dis mawnin’. Feelin’ better now. Cold gittin’ well. Feelin’ mighty hungry.” His eye traveled speculatively toward the stove.

There was absolutely no doubt about his telling the truth. When Hercules was trying to conceal something his language was much more eloquent and flowery.

“Your breakfast will be ready before long,” said Nyoda kindly. Then, as Hercules hobbled toward the stove she asked solicitously, “Have you a sore foot, Hercules?”

“No’m,” replied Hercules, “but the mizry in my knees is powerful bad dis mawnin’, Mis’ ’Lizbeth. Seems like my old jints is gittin’ plumb rusted.” He launched into a detailed description of the various pains caused by his “mizry,” until Nyoda sought refuge in the front part of the house. She had heard the tale many times before.

Pretty soon Hercules hobbled in and took a look at the footprints on the stairs.

“Powerful sing’ler,” he said, scratching his head in a puzzled way.

Sherry went on to explain all the details for the old man’s benefit. “We thought at first he must have come in through the window on the stair landing, but that hadn’t been touched, so we decided he must have come in through one of the upstairs windows. It seems queer, though, that the footprints should have begun under the stair landing, doesn’t it?”

“What’s the matter, Hercules, are you sick?” asked Nyoda, looking at the old man in alarm. For Hercules’ eyes were rolling wildly in his head and his legs threatened to collapse under him. He sat heavily down on a chair and began to rock to and fro, muttering to himself in a terrified way. Straining their ears to catch his words, they heard him say:

“Debbil’s a-comin’, debbil’s a-comin’, debbil’s a-comin’ after old Herc’les for takin’ dat shutter down. Debbil done lef’ his footprint fer a warnin’ fer old Herc’les.”

He seemed beside himself with fright. Nyoda and Sherry looked at each other in perplexity.

“What’s the matter with him?” asked Nyoda, in a tone of concern.

“Superstitious,” replied Sherry reassuringly. “Most negroes believe the devil is walking around on two legs, waiting to grab them from behind every fence. You remember Uncle Jasper mentioned in his diary that he told Jasper if he ever took that shutter down the devil would come in through the window and get him. Now he thinks it’s happened. Don’t be alarmed at him. Get him his breakfast, and that’ll give him something else to think about.”

The Winnebagos hastened to set out his breakfast on the table, but he ate scarcely anything, and still trembled when he went back to his rooms in the coach house.

“Funny old codger!” commented Sherry, looking after him. “He’s chuck full of superstition. If he throws many more such fits, I suppose I’ll have to nail up the old shutter again to keep him from dying of fright.”

“You’ll do no such thing!” replied Nyoda. “I’ll have no more holes in that casement. Hercules will be all right again in a day or two. By that time he’ll have a new bogie.

“Now everybody come to breakfast, and forget all about this miserable business.”