“What am I looking for?” she said, smiling to herself. “I’ve read in detective stories how the sleuth ran about a room, like a hound on the scent,—always like a hound on the scent. But he had something to detect,—some criminal of whom to hunt traces. I don’t believe the criminal was here in this room, so there can be no clues. Unless a note called Kim away,—that might be!”
She looked through the small writing case that lay on a table. But it held nothing but fresh stationery, stamps and so forth. It looked as if it had never been used.
“A present from somebody,” Elsie decided. “Nobody ever uses ’em!”
She glanced through some dresser drawers, but there was nothing out of order, nothing unusual, only the appointments of a man’s wardrobe.
Idly, Elsie tapped at the walls. She had no knowledge as to what sort of a sound revealed a secret passage and what sort meant a solid wall. But other and wiser people had thoroughly tested that point, and one and all declared there wasn’t a chance of a secret or concealed exit from the room.
And yet, Kimball had gone out of it, and had fastened the door behind him. Whether alone or accompanied, whether of his own volition or not, he had left the room that night, and had never been seen or heard of since.
The very impossibility of the case made it weird. But no belief in supernatural forces took root in Elsie’s brain.
“A clue,” she said to herself, over and over again. “I must find a clue! In books they search the floor,—I’ll search the floor.”
She did, going over it on her hands and knees. But the careful sweeping it had received had obliterated any footprints,—so beloved of writers of detective fiction! and had also removed any of the conventional shreds of cloth, ravellings or any such oft found bits of evidence.
However, the maid who did the sweeping was not entirely unique among her sort, for she had slighted her work when sweeping under the bed. There Elsie found some rolls of dust that would have roused Mrs. Webb’s ire had she known of their existence.