“You say that someone heard the sound of the shot?” I asked suddenly.
“Several people,” replied Bristol; “but no one knows, or no one will say, from what direction it came. I shall go on with the inquiry, of course, and cross-examine every soul in Wyatt’s Buildings. Meanwhile, I’m open to confess that I am beaten.”
In the velvet sky countless points blazed tropically. The hum of the traffic in Waterloo Road reached us only in a muffled way. Sordidness lay beneath us, but up there under the heavens we seemed removed from it as any Babylonian astronomer communing with the stars.
When, some ten minutes later, I passed out into the noise of Waterloo Road, I left behind me an unsolved mystery and took with me a great dread; for I knew that the quest of the sacred slipper was not ended, I knew that another tragedy was added to its history—and I feared to surmise what the future might hold for all of us.
CHAPTER XVII
THE WOMAN WITH THE BASKET
Deep in thought respecting the inexplicable nature of this latest mystery, I turned in the direction of the bridge, and leaving behind me an ever-swelling throng at the gate of Wyatt’s Buildings, proceeded westward.
The death of the dwarf had lifted the case into the realms of the marvellous, and I noted nothing of the bustle about me, for mentally I was still surveying that hunched-up body which had fallen out of empty space.
Then in upon my preoccupation burst a woman’s scream!
I aroused myself from reverie, looking about to right and left. Evidently I had been walking slowly, for I was less than a hundred yards from Wyatt’s Buildings, and hard by the entrance to an uninviting alley from which I thought the scream had proceeded.
And as I hesitated, for I had no desire to become involved in a drunken brawl, again came the shrill scream: “Help! help!”