“Nothing but the roof. You noticed that the whole shanty is one of those crazy frame buildings that chink laundries so often get into. Well, I saw there was a trap-door to the roof, but there was no ladder or anything to get up to it, so I didn’t try to see what was on the roof. It wasn’t likely there was anything.”
“The rooms were quite empty?”
“Yes, except for dust,” replied Patsy. “The dust was some help,” he continued, with a grin. “For I saw the marks of a lot of feet, and they were all flat, like the prints of chink felt shoes—except that there was one mark, which I found at different parts of the room, partly hidden by the chink shoes, and which showed that a fellow with American shoes had been there. They were large.”
“I see,” nodded Nick, rather eagerly. “The person who owned them was a big man?”
“I should think so, from the shoe prints.”
“Wasn’t there any furniture in the room, nor any scraps of rubbish that might give us a clew?”
Nick Carter put this question rather sharply. He couldn’t believe that his quick-witted assistant had come away without finding something that might be useful.
“There was this,” replied Patsy, handing a scrap of paper to his chief. “I don’t know that it means anything. It was on the crooked staircase. Being white, it caught my eye, and I picked it up. I was going to throw it down again, and I would have done so if I hadn’t remembered that you always say it is better to keep and examine everything when you are on a case, no matter if it doesn’t seem of any account.”
Long before Patsy had finished his disquisition, Nick Carter had taken from him the scrap of white letter paper his assistant had held out, and he was now gazing at it with a thoughtful eye.
The scrap of paper had been torn from an envelope—that was shown by the fact that part of the gummed flap still adhered—and on the fragment was a name, or part of one. It was “Bentha.”