"Yes," I replied. "Very interesting."
"Those will be human bones, I fancy; h'm?"
"I should say so undoubtedly," I answered.
"Now," said the inspector, "could you say, offhand, which finger those bones belong to?"
I smothered a grin (for I had been expecting this question), and answered:
"I can say offhand that they don't belong to any finger. They are the bones of the left great toe."
The inspector's jaw dropped.
"The deuce they are!" he muttered. "H'm. I thought they looked a bit stout."
"I expect," said I, "that if you go through the mud close to where this came from you'll find the rest of the foot."
The plain-clothes man proceeded at once to act on my suggestion, taking the sieve with him to save time. And sure enough, after filling it twice with the mud from the bottom of the pool, the entire skeleton of the foot was brought to light.