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 handprint 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.
Chapter V.
When Aggie Screamed
Now Aggie has hay fever, and the slightest excitement, any time in the year, starts her off. So when we heard her sneezing as we went down the stairs, we were not surprised to find Tommy Andrews In front of her with an order book on his knee, and Aggie trying to hold a glass thermometer in her mouth.
'I can't," she was protesting around the thermometer. "Justh try sneething yourself with a—a—choo."
Her teeth came down on it just then with a snap and her face grew agonized.
"There!" she said. "What did I tell you?" And pulled the thermometer out minus an end.
"Where's the rest?" Tommy demanded.
"I—I swallowed it!"
Tommy jumped up. and looked frightened.
"Great heavens, it's glass I" he said. "What in thunder—why, there it is in your lap!"
"I swallowed the inside," Aggie said stiffly. "I should think that's bad enough. It's poison, isn't it?"
Tommy laughed. "It won't hurt you," he said. "It's only quicksilver."
But Aggie was only partly reassured. "I daresay I'll be coated inside like the back of a mirror," she snapped. "Between being frightened to death until I'm in a fever, and then swallowing the contents of a thermometer, and having it expand with the heat of my body, and maybe blow up, I feel as though I'm on the border of the spirit land myself."
In spite of Tommy's reassurances, she refused to be comforted, and sat the rest of the afternoon waiting for something to happen. She ate no luncheon, and she absolutely refused to go home. Aggie is like most soft-mannered people, trying to make her do something she doesn't want is like pounding a pillow. It seems to give way, and the next minute it's back where it was at first, and you can pound till your hands ache. So when she said she was going to stay at the hospital until she felt sure the mercury wasn't going to blow up or poison her, we had to yield.
We got the room next to Tish's and put her to bed, and she lay there alternately sneezing and sleeping the rest of the day. I went out during the afternoon and brought a nightgown for her and one for myself, and the mentholated cotton wool for her nose. The walk did me good, and by the time I got back I was ready to sneer at footprints that go up a wall and Johnson hanging to a chandelier.
As I left the elevator at Tish's door, I met Miss Linda Smith and stopped her. "Is there anything new?" I asked.
"Nothing, except that Miss Blake has been sent back to bed," she said. "She's a nervous little thing anyhow, and she has not been here very long. When she