THE FOOTPRINT ON THE WALL
Well, Tish and I examined the room, and I must say at first sight it
was disappointing. It was an ordinary hospital room, with two windows,
and a bureau between them, a washstand, a single brass bed, set high
and not made up, the pillows being piled in the center of the mattress
and all covered with a sheet, and two chairs, a straight one and a
rocker. Except that the heavy chandelier was bent somewhat from the
perpendicular, there was no sign of what had happened there.
Tish sat down in the rocker and looked thoughtfully about the room.
“Under ordinary circumstances,” she said, “if you hang a broadcloth
skirt on a chandelier to brush it, you’ll have the whole business and
half the ceiling about your head in a minute. And yet, look at that,
hardly bent!”
The room had evidently not been disturbed since Johnson had been found
there. The straight chair had been drawn beneath the chandelier, and
Tish pointed out the scratches made by the feet of whoever had cut
down the body. Over the back of the chair still hung the roller towel,
twisted into a grisly rope.
Tish picked it up and examined it.
“Pretty extravagant of material, aren’t they?” she said. “No Ladies’
Aid that I ever saw would put more than two yards of twelve-cent stuff
in a roller towel. Look at the weight of that, and the length!”
“There’s something on it,” I said, and we looked together. What we
found were only three letters, stamped in blue ink.
“S. P. T.?” said Tish. “What in creation is S. P. T.?”
She sat down with the towel in her hand, and we puzzled over it
together.
“It’s the initials of the sewing circle that sent it in,” I asserted.
“That S. stands for Society.”
“I’ve got it,” said Tish. “Society for the Prevention of Tetanus.”
“That doesn’t help much,” I said. “We could find out by asking; I
daresay the nurses know.”
But Tish wouldn’t hear of it. She said the towel was the only clue we
had, and she wasn’t going to give it to a hospital full of people who
didn’t seem to care whether their corpses walked around at night or not.
She rolled up the towel under her arm, and in the doorway she turned to
take a final survey of the room.
“Well,” she said, “we haven’t examined the dust with the microscope,
but I think it’s been worth while. It would be curious, Lizzie, if his
murdered wife’s initials were S. P. T.”
“They couldn’t be,” I said. “Her last name was Johnson, wasn’t it?”
But Tish wasn’t looking at me. She was staring intently at the wall
over the head of the bed, and I followed her eyes.
The wall was gray, a dull gray below, and a frieze of paler gray above.
The dividing line between the two colors was not a picture molding--the
room had no pictures--but a narrow iron pipe, perhaps an inch in
thickness, and painted the color of the frieze. Why a pipe, I never
asked, but I fancy its roundness, its lack of angles and lines, had
been thought, like the gray walls, to be restful to the eyes.
Directly over the head of the bed, the pipe-molding was loosened from
the wall, as if by a powerful wrench, and sagged at least four inches.
“Look at that!” said Tish, pointing her cane. “Lizzie, I want you to
help me up on the bureau.”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort, Tish,” I snapped. “You ought to be
ashamed with that leg.”
But she had pulled out the lowest drawer and was standing on it by
that time, and there wasn’t anything for it but to help her up. She
caught hold of the pipe-molding between the windows, and jerked at it.
“I thought so,” she said. “It doesn’t give a hair’s breadth! Lizzie, no
picture ever pulled that molding down like that.”
Well, it was curious, when you think about it. It’s easy enough to read
Mr. Conan Doyle’s stories, knowing that no matter how puzzling the
different clues seem to be, Mr. Doyle knows exactly what made them,
and at the right time he’ll let you into his secret, and you’ll wonder
why you never thought of the right explanation at the time. But it is
different to have to work them out yourself, and to save my life I
couldn’t see anything to that bended pipe but a bended pipe.
Tish’s next move was to crawl upon the bed, and that time I helped her
willingly. She stood for quite a while, gazing at the pipe, with her
nostrils twitching, steadying herself with one hand against the wall
to put on her glasses with the other.
“Humph!” she said. “I can’t quite make it out. There are prints against
the wall just underneath, but it doesn’t seem to be a hand.”
I got up beside her and we both looked. It was a hand, and it wasn’t.
It seemed like a long hand with short fingers. Tish leaned down and
rubbed her hand on the headboard of the bed, which was dusty, as she
expected, and then pressed its imprint against the wall beside the
other. They were alike, and they were different, and suddenly it came
to me, and it made me dizzy.
“I know what it is now, Tish,” I said as calmly as I could. “That’s the
mark of a foot!”
Tish nodded. She’d seen it almost as soon as I had.
“A foot,” she repeated gravely, and we climbed off the bed in a hurry
and went out into the hall.
Tish had left her cane in her excitement, and she refused to go back
for it alone. I went with her, finally, and we stood at the bottom of
the bed and looked at the foot, with its toes pointed up toward the
ceiling, and Tish’s hand beside it.
“You know, Lizzie,” she said, clutching my arm, “if there _were_ a
fourth dimension, we could walk up walls easily.”
And we went down to her room again.
It was careless of us to forget Tish’s hand-print on the wall, for when
things got worse, and they discovered the two marks, somebody suggested
that no two hands make exactly the same print, and they had an expert
take an impression of it. As Tish said, she expected to be discovered
every time she had her pulse counted, and the strain was awful. They
might have accused _her_, you know, of carrying off old Johnson
and stringing him up, for they reached a state when they suspected
everybody.