Next day he managed to get up some of the small postal packages. The first one I opened was from one of the Assistant Editors in town.
“I see in the papers that you’ve had a heavy fall of snow,” she wrote, “and as there was not a solitary line from you this morning, I’m wondering if you are isolated? At any rate, I’m sending you a home-made cake and a box of smoked sausages by this post (instead of MSS.) in case you may be cut off from supplies.”
“If that isn’t bed-rock common sense,” said Ursula. “Most intelligent girls would have improved the occasion by sending you newspaper cuttings with statistics of the latest submarine sinkings, to keep your spirits up.”
Another slight fall of snow was all the late afternoon brought us, not enough to spoil the newly cleared path, but sufficient to reveal the fact next morning that someone with large masculine boots had been promenading round the cottage, for there were the footprints, a clear track that even a detective could not have failed to see, leading from the gate to the outhouses, from the outhouses to the scullery door, from the scullery door to the best door (it’s absurd to call it the front door, because each side is as much the front as the other excepting the part that backs into the hill!), from the best door to the door with the porch, and so on, out of the gate again.
As none of us knew anything about them, we concluded the handy man must have returned, bent on some new errand of mercy. But he disowned them; had not been near the place since the previous forenoon, and the snow had not fallen till five o’clock. It looked exceedingly queer, not to say uncanny, and we recalled the fact that the dog had barked violently after we were in bed. So far as I knew, there was no resident on those hills who would think of wandering round the house after dark; and no tramp or odd wayfarer would ever scale those heights unless he had some very urgent reason for so doing, and had a definite destination. It is too stiff a climb to take on a casual chance of picking up anything; moreover, unless a man knew his way, he would soon lose himself. Though the footprints really perplexed me, I did not say very much about them; but Eileen did.
When Mr. Jones from a neighbouring farm arrived with milk, I heard the full description being given him at the kitchen door. He expressed due interest, and described a mysterious case he had just read about, in the weekly paper, of a servant who had disappeared from a house in London where she had been in service for years, and no trace of her had been found since. Eileen and he agreed as to the many points of similarity between the two cases.
When the lad from the butcher’s came to know what portion I wished to bespeak of the sheep they would be killing, come Friday, I heard Eileen once more going through the story of the footprints, combined with details of the missing domestic. He, in turn, told her how a burglar had been one morning in a house next door to his grandmother’s in Bristol, and how, when they chased him, he jumped right over the garden wall, into the very dish of potatoes his aunt was peeling for his dinner. (The pronouns were confusing, but I don’t think it was for the burglar’s dinner the potatoes were intended.)
The farmer’s daughter who came to inquire if I would like a fowl, after hearing the story, offered to lend Eileen a novelette she had just been reading, where there were footprints exactly like these; and in the last chapter it turns out that the footprints were those of—I forget who or what, but it was very enthralling, and Eileen gratefully jumped at the offer of the loan.
The old man who came to say that they couldn’t deliver any coals till the weather broke, remarked that he didn’t like the look of it at all, and said he should be quite nervous if he were she, and asked her if she had heard about the old woman who had been found dead in her bed in Yorkshire, died of cold, and fifty golden sovereigns tied up in the middle of her pillow? Eileen had not heard of it. The old man said it was as well to keep your eyes open, as there were funny people in the world, and this seemed to him just such another affair.