“I give it up,” said Sherry, who could make nothing from the facts before him and had no imagination to help him supply missing details. “The man undoubtedly got in through the upstairs window and out the same way. He was a burglar, only he got scared away before he could steal anything. Some noise in the house, probably.”
“He must have heard Slim snoring, and thought it was a bombing plane coming after him,” said Justice, and then dodged nimbly as Slim made a pass at his head with a menacing hand.
“Whatever he did to his foot fixed him,” said Sherry. “He called it a day when that happened and went off without making a haul. Probably had a pal outside in a machine.”
“Nyoda,” said Sahwah, struck with a sudden thought, “do you think it could have been Hercules? He might have come in for something in the night.”
“Of course!” exclaimed Nyoda. “Why didn’t I think of that before? Hercules has a key to the back door. How idiotic of me not to have guessed before that it was Hercules. Here we stand looking at these footprints like Robinson Crusoe looking at Friday’s, and talking about burglars, and wracking our brains wondering where he came in, and it must have been Hercules all the while. He cut his foot and came in to get something for it, or he came in to get something more for his cold and cut his foot after he got in. Poor old Hercules! He wouldn’t even wake us up to get help. I’ll go right out and find out what happened to him.”
She started for the back door, but before she had reached the kitchen there was a stamping of feet on the back doorstep, a tapping on the door, and then Hercules opened it himself and came in, as was his custom.
“Mawnin’, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he quavered genially, smiling a broad, toothless smile at the sight of her. “Mighty nippy dis mawnin’.” He shivered and stamped his feet on the floor, edging over toward the stove.
Nyoda looked down at his feet hastily and instantly realized that it was not he who had left the print on the stairs. The loose, flapping felt slippers which Hercules invariably wore, bursting out on all sides, would have left a mark twice the size of the mysterious footprints. Nobody knew just how big Hercules’ feet were. He owned to wearing a size twelve, at which Sherry openly scoffed.
“I’ll bet a size fifteen could hurt him,” he declared.
The rest also saw at a glance that there was no possibility of Hercules having made the footprints.