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Page 36
"Impossible?' cried Sir Henry.
"`Quite impossible,' Mr. Meadows insisted. 'Millson tells us
that the man he saw running away in the night wore a blue coat
and reddish-brown trousers. He says he was barely able to
distinguish the blue coat, but that he could see the
reddish-brown trousers very clearly. Now, as a matter of fact,
it has been very accurately determined that red is the hardest
color to distinguish at night, and blue the very easiest. A blue
coat would be clearly visible long after reddish-brown trousers
had become indistinguishable in the darkness.'
"Sir Henry's under jaw sagged a little. `Why, yes,' he said,
`that's true; that's precisely true. Gross, at the University of
Gratz, determined that by experiment in 1912. I never thought
about it!'
"`There are some other things here that you have not, perhaps,
precisely thought about,' Mr. Meadows went on.
"`For example, the things that happened in this room did not
happen in the night. They happened in the day.'
"He pointed to the half-burned wax candle on the table. `There's
a headless joiner's nail driven into the table,' he said, `and
this candle is set down over the nail. That means that the
person who placed it there wished it to remain there - to remain
there firmly. He didn't put it down there for the brief
requirements of a passing tragedy, he put it there to remain;
that's one thing.
"`Another thing is that this candle thus firmly fastened on the
table was never alight there. If it had ever been burning in its
position on the table, some of the drops of melted wax would have
fallen about it.
"`You will observe that, while the candle is firmly fixed, it
does not set straight; it is inclined at least ten degrees out of
perpendicular. In that position it couldn't have burned for a
moment without dripping melted wax on the table. And there's
none on the table; there has never been any on it. Your glass
shows not the slightest evidence of a wax stain.' He added:
`Therefore the candle is a blind; false evidence to give us the
impression of a night affair.'
"Sir Henry's jaw sagged; now his mouth gaped. `True,' he said.
`True, true.' He seemed to get some relief to his damaged
deductions out of the repeated word.
"The irony in Mr. Meadows' voice increased a little. `Nor is
that all,' he said. `The smear on the floor, and the stains in
which the naked foot tracked, are not human blood. They're not
any sort of blood. It was clearly evident when you had your lens
over them. They show no coagulated fiber. They show only the
evidences of dye - weak dye - watered red ink, I'd say.'
"I thought Sir Henry was going to crumple up in his chair. He
seemed to get loose and baggy in some extraordinary fashion, and
his gaping jaw worked. `But the footprints,' he said, `the naked
footprints?' His voice was a sort of stutter-the sort of shaken
stutter of a man who has come a' tumbling cropper.
"The American actually laughed: he laughed as we sometimes laugh
at a mental defective.
"`They're not footprints!' he said. `Nobody ever had a foot
cambered like that, or with a heel like it, or with toes like it.
Somebody made those prints with his hand - the edge of his palm
for the heel and the balls of his fingers for the toes. The
wide, unstained distances between these heelprints and the prints
of the ball of the toes show the impossible arch.'
"Sir Henry was like a man gone to pieces. `But who - who made
them?' he faltered.
"The American leaned forward and put the big glass over the
prints that Sir Henry had made with his fingers in the white dust
on the mahogany table. `I think you know the answer to your
question,' he said. `The whorls of these prints are identical
with those of the toe tracks.'
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