“At first I did not realize the significance of what I had discovered. Then it suddenly came to me that a man could easily leave the foot-prints of a one-legged man if in walking he used a stilt or some such device. Also I recalled that the new prints had begun at Wonderley’s window. Then I knew why he hadn’t joined us in Parkington’s room sooner. It was because he was probably in hiding somewhere at the other side of the house waiting for a chance to slip back into his room after having murdered my friend and left those bewildering prints.
“I came back to the house, crept upstairs and went through his things. You know what I found and what happened after that.”
Hear Not, See Not, Speak Not Evil
by Walter Deffenbaugh
I
The opaque light through the drawn shade of the library window alone marked the location of the big house, surrounded by flower-dotted*lawns. Half a mile away twinkled the few midnight lamps of the village. An occasional belated motor car flashed as a meteor through the night. A flash and a rumble from over the hill marked the passing of a trolley-car on its way to the city.
At night it was a particularly lonesome spot, but this did not seem to bother in the least Dr. Darius Y. Porter, wealthy and famous specialist in diseases of the eye, ear and throat, as he strolled leisurely homeward after dinner and bridge with a neighbor.
His eyes were turned toward the light he had left burning on his reading table as a bearing in his search for the small side gate, when another light flashed on at an upper window. He immediately located this as the chamber of old Martha, his housekeeper, who had come to him as a sort of charity patient and remained because she had proved invaluable during the progress of her cure of deafness.
“Up rather late,” he mused, as he glanced upward and then halted in his tracks, because there was thrust upward as though from the bottom of a screen in a motion picture the shadow of a hand — a hand with the fingers rapidly working in the code of the deaf and dumb.
“Help! Burglars! Help!” was the message he read from the frantic fingers as they spelled out, in the code he had taught her, a message of appeal plainly destined for his eye in case he should be returning along the road.
Fumbling hurriedly along the high hedge, he found his gate and was unlatching it when, to his amazement, shadows appeared upon the curtain of the library window — and these too showed fingers working in the silent code — fingers attached to rather dim figures — figures of two, or perhaps three men — figures that waved back and forth and fingers upon arms which seemed to gesticulate as though to emphasize a soundless argument.
Porter’s nerves had been steeled by years in hospitals, his muscles tautened by years of semi-retirement upon his country estate. His gate was flung open as he looked and he bounded up the gravel path to the side veranda of his home to attack these intruders with his bare hands.
His surprise attack was balked by the darkness. Running by instinct, he fell sprawling over a chair old Martha had been using for an after-dinner reverie beneath the vines that covered the porch, and chair and physician fell together in a resounding crash. He was up in a second and had his key in the lock of the side door, but already he could hear voices inside and the sound of hurried retreat.
“Quick! Beat it!” shouted one voice.
“Help me, Dan, damn you,” whined another.
“Let go my coat, you—,” he heard one say amid the noise of running feet and overturned furniture, while old Martha screamed lustily from her now opened window.
Abandoning this attack, Porter leaped from the veranda and ran to the front of the house. He was beginning to believe he could make out something moving against a sky-line formed by a rise of ground — something that looked like two running men, one almost dragging the other — when he bumped full tilt into what was undoubtedly a man, huddled in a clump of rose bushes, with his back toward him and facing the main entrance to the grounds.
The impact knocked the doctor from his feet and before he could recover, the man was running across the lawn. As Porter staggered up, a shot fanned the hair along the side of his head and, philosophically, he turned back into his open front door with his thoughts about equally divided between the screams of his housekeeper and the safety of a pearl necklace in his safe — a treasure of which he was trustee — a wedding gift for his daughter from her dead mother, when the time should come.
A shouted word up the stairs quieted the screams, but many unprofessional oaths failed to alter the scene as he looked into his library, where the door of the safe stood open, with its contents scattered about on the floor. The case in which his wife’s necklace had rested undisturbed for ten years was upside down on the library table. Empty — a quick glance showed. But something crunched under his foot as he moved and sweat that the thieves had not started broke out on his forehead as he turned on more lights and retrieved the fragments of a pearl.
Standing in his tracks, then cautiously kneeling and creeping, he searched with eyes and fingers until he had found eleven more, waving back and silencing the moaning old woman who wavered in the doorway. Twelve, that accounted for — twelve out of thirty-six. They had got twenty-four of them, then, the scoundrels, he decided. Well, he should have them back — have them if it took all his time and his life besides. He was something of a sentimentalist, this doctor, for all his calm exterior. A sentimentalist, with a touch of the masterful and stubborn.
With a sigh, he arose to his feet, took up his telephone and called the village police. He had not stopped to question Martha until then. As he thought, she knew nothing. She had been suddenly, vaguely disturbed; she had listened and heard sounds downstairs — voices that were those of strangers; then an oath and noise of a quarrel; afraid to shout, she had recalled the code of her days of deafness and acted upon an impulse to try to signal her master in case he should be coming along the road.
There was no help there. Neither was there in the weighty theories offered by the village police sergeant upon his tumultuous arrival upon the scene a few minutes later. Dr. Porter was glad when they were all gone and he was able to light his pipe and sink into his easy chair with his feet resting carefully amid the scattered contents of his safe, which still littered the floor.
Daylight, for which he had waited, came just about the time he was ready for it. He had said nothing to the village sergeant about the talking fingers, but he had spent the night thinking about them and also about the crouching figure into whose heedless back he had crashed. He had reached two conclusions, born of his long observance of defective mankind. One of the men who had robbed him was dumb. There had been an argument and those who could had not hesitated to use their voices. Martha testified to that. Therefore there was one who could not speak, but was still determined to have his say.
The man in the bushes, he decided, was stone deaf. Sensing danger, when the others took to their heels, there had been no sound to warn him of the direction of the danger. Therefore he crouched in the bushes with his eyes to the main gate, waiting for a glimpse of his peril. The sudden start of the thief, which he felt, rather than saw, as he collided with him, showed that the man had not even heard his running pursuit or his shouts calling rather foolishly upon the burglars to halt.
So far, so good, he had decided. But what of the third man — of that figure that seemed to drag behind another at his last glimpse of them. Therefore he welcomed the daylight.