horribly contorted look on his features that I have ever seen—half of pain, half of fear, as if of something nameless.
Kennedy bent over. His hands were cold.
Northrop had been dead at least twelve hours, perhaps longer. All night the deserted museum had guarded its terrible secret.
As Craig peered into his face, he saw, in the fleshy part of the neck, just below the left ear, a round red mark, with just a drop or two of now black coagulated blood in the center. All around we could see a vast amount of miscellaneous stuff, partly unpacked, partly just opened, and waiting to be taken out of the wrappings by the now motionless hands.
“I suppose you are more or less familiar with what Northrop brought back?” asked Kennedy of Bernardo, running his eye over the material in the room.
“Yes, reasonably,” answered Bernardo. “Before the cases arrived from the wharf, he told me in detail what he had managed to bring up with him.”
“I wish, then, that you would look it over and see if there is anything missing,” requested Craig, already himself busy in going over the room for other evidence.
Doctor Bernardo hastily began taking a mental inventory of the stuff. While they worked, I tried vainly to frame some theory which would explain the startling facts we had so suddenly discovered.
Mitla, I knew, was south of the city of Oaxaca, and there, in its ruined palaces, was the crowning achievement of the old Zapotec kings. No ruins in America were more elaborately ornamented or richer in lore for the archeologist.
Northrop had brought up porphyry blocks with quaint grecques and much hieroglyphic painting. Already unpacked were half a dozen copper axes, some of the first of that particular style that had ever been brought to the United States. Besides the sculptured stones and the mosaics were jugs, cups, vases, little gods, sacrificial stones—enough, almost, to equip a new alcove in the museum.
Before Northrop was an idol, a hideous thing on which frogs and snakes squatted and coiled. It was a fitting piece to accompany the gruesome occupant of the little room in his long, last vigil. In fact, it almost sent a shudder over me, and if I had been inclined to the superstitious, I should certainly have concluded that this was retribution for having disturbed the lares and penates of a dead race.
Doctor Bernardo was going over the material a second time. By the look on his face, even I could guess that something was missing.
“What is it?” asked Craig, following the curator closely.
“Why,” he answered slowly, “there was an inscription—we were looking at it earlier in the day—on a small block of porphyry. I don’t see it.”
He paused and went back to his search before we could ask him further what he thought the inscription was about.
I thought nothing myself at the time of his reticence, for Kennedy had gone over to a window back of Northrop and to the left. It was fully twenty feet from the downward slope of the campus there, and, as he craned his neck out, he noted that the copper leader of the rain pipe ran past it a few feet away.
I, too, looked out. A thick group of trees hid the window from the avenue beyond the campus wall, and below us, at a corner of the building, was a clump of rhododendrons. As Craig bent over the sill, he whipped out a pocket lens.
A moment later he silently handed the glass to me. As nearly as I could make out, there were five marks on the dust of the sill.
“Fingerprints!” I exclaimed. “Some one has been clinging to the edge of the ledge.”
“In that case,” Craig observed quietly, “there would have been only four prints.”
I looked again, puzzled. The prints were flat and well separated.
“No,” he added, “not fingerprints—toe-prints.”
“Toe-prints?” I echoed.
Before he could reply, Craig had dashed out of the room, around, and under the window. There, he was carefully going over the soft earth around the bushes below.
“What are you looking for?” I asked, joining him.
“Some one—perhaps two—has been here,” he remarked, almost under his breath. “One, at least, has removed his shoes. See those shoe-prints up to this point? The print of a boot-heel in soft earth shows the position and contour of every nail head. Bertillon has made a collection of such nails, certain types, sizes, and shapes used in certain boots, showing often what country the shoes came from. Even the number and pattern are significant. Some factories use a fixed number of nails and arrange them in a particular manner. I have made my own collection of such prints in this country. These were American shoes. Perhaps the clue will not lead us anywhere, though, for I doubt whether it was an American foot.”
Kennedy continued to study the marks.
“He removed his shoes—either to help in climbing or to prevent noise—ah—here’s the foot! Strange—see how small it is—and broad, how prehensile the toes—almost like fingers. Surely that foot could never have been encased in American shoes all its life. I shall make plaster casts of these, to preserve later.”
He was still scouting about on hands and knees in the dampness of the rhododendrons. Suddenly he reached his long arm in among the shrubs and picked up a little reed stick. On the end of it was a small cylinder of buff brown.
He looked at it curiously, dug his nail into the soft mass, then rubbed his nail over the tip of his tongue gingerly.
With a wry face, as if the taste were extremely acrid, he moistened his handkerchief and wiped off his tongue vigorously.
“Even that minute particle that was on my nail makes my tongue tingle and feel numb,” he remarked, still rubbing. “Let us go back again. I want to see Bernardo.”
“Had he any visitors during the day?” queried Kennedy, as he reentered the ghastly little room, while the curator stood outside, completely unnerved by the tragedy which had been so close to him without his apparently knowing it. Kennedy was squeezing out from the little wound on Northrop’s neck a few drops of liquid on a sterilized piece of glass.
“No; no one,” Bernardo answered, after a moment.
“Did you see anyone in the museum who looked suspicious?” asked Kennedy, watching Bernardo’s face keenly.
“No,” he hesitated. “There were several people wandering about among the exhibits, of course. One, I recall, late in the afternoon, was a little dark-skinned woman, rather good-looking.”
“A Mexican?”
“Yes, I should say so. Not of Spanish descent, though. She was rather of the Indian type. She seemed to be much interested in the various exhibits, asked me several questions, very intelligently, too. Really, I thought she was trying to—er—flirt with me.”
He shot a glance at Craig, half of confession, half of embarrassment.
“And—oh, yes—there was another—a man, a little man, as I recall, with shaggy hair. He looked like a Russian to me. I remember, because he came to the door, peered around hastily, and went away. I thought he might have got into the wrong part of the building and went to direct him right—but before I could get out into the hall, he was gone. I remember, too, that, as I turned, the woman had followed me and soon was asking other questions—which, I will admit—I was glad to answer.”
“Was Northrop in his room while these people were here?”
“Yes; he had locked the door so that none of the students or visitors could disturb him.”
“Evidently the woman was diverting your attention while the man entered Northrop’s room by the window,” ruminated Craig, as we stood for a moment in the outside doorway.
He had already telephoned to our old friend Doctor Leslie, the coroner, to take charge of the case, and now was ready to leave. The news had spread, and the janitor of