"Chinamen!" I cried.
"Or Japs," remarked the grocer. "Come to think of it, they must 've been Japs; they did n't have no pigtails."
Well, there was nothing else for me to do but turn round and go back the way I had come. The grocer could tell me no more, and I was completely stumped. Why four Chinese—or Japs—should be interested in my movements in the Page house I could not in the least imagine.
But one thing was certain. I had skirted the border of some secret, desperate enterprise. It challenged directly all my powers and capabilities. I was irritated, nettled, not at my inability to fathom the mystery at once, but at a species of mental numbness which prevented me from even conjecturing a plausible theory to account for the strange episode.
I strode along in a deep, moody revery, unconsciously scanning each in turn of the absurdly small footprints. I vaulted the low wall into the Page premises, and before I had fairly recovered my balance, I pounced upon a folded sheet of paper which lay in the snow on one side of the trail.
I unfolded it. The sheet bore a roughly sketched floor plan of some house's interior. There was a wide hall, a square stair-well, and three or four rooms. One of the rooms—the smallest—had been designated by a cross.
All at once I uttered a little cry. This was a second-floor plan of the very house I had been exploring. Although I had not been up-stairs yet, I had seen enough of the relative positions of the different rooms to recognize the one indicated by the cross.
It was the bath room.
[1] Dr. De Breen figures conspicuously in the remarkable case of Estes Lamar, chronicled in the third volume of Inspector Swift's "Reminiscences."