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.
“Finger-prints!” I exclaimed. “Some one has been clinging to the edge of the ledge.”