At no time did Trotter feel that there was anything momentous in the movement. But it aroused his curiosity. It challenged investigation. It set off his inquisitive young soul into spreading pyrotechnics of imagination. And he realized, as he walked up to the barrel, that his earlier sense of timidity had disappeared. He quite calmly lifted the parcel from the barrel top. Then he quite calmly dropped the other parcel in its place.
He was a little astonished, as he started on again, at the pregnant weight of this new parcel. But he did not stop to investigate. He did not care to gulp and lose the mystery at one swallow. He scurried off with it, chucklingly, like a barnyard hen with a corncob, to peck at it in solitude. He swung south and then west again, to his own street. He went up his own steps, through his own door, and up to his own top-floor room with the rakish back wall. There he cautiously lighted the gas, drew the blinds, and locked himself in. Next, he dragged a chair over to the bedside, sat down on it, and carefully untied the parcel string. Then, with somewhat accelerated pulse, he unwrapped the paper-screened enigma.
A little puff of ironic disappointment escaped his pursed-up lips. For at one glance he could see that it held no mystery. The only mystery about it all was that he had been theatrical enough to imagine it could prove anything that was not sordid and worthless.
For lying on the paper before him was nothing more than a litter of mortar and wall plaster, interspersed with stone chips. It was nothing more than the sweepings a brick-layer had left behind him, a pile of worthless rubbish, a bundle of refuse, another white elephant on his hands.
Trotter stirred the heap of dust and lime, impassively, disdainfully. There was nothing more than an occasional brick corner, an occasional piece of wall plaster. The only other thing was one larger fragment of stone. Trotter looked at it indolently. It was merely a piece of granite—an ounce or two of stone with one highly polished end, a bit of refuse which a hurrying mason might have used to "rubble" a wall crevice. And he had been fool enough to cart it up four flights of stairs!
He turned the piece of stone over in his hands. It was of porphyritic granite, with distinct crystals of feldspar embedded in a fine grained matrix. Trotter's brow wrinkled in vague thought as he peered down at it. He was trying to think what it reminded him of, what possible link it made in a chain of lost association.
Then he remembered. It was toward the pillars of the First National Trust Building that his mind was trying to grope. They were of the same stuff, highly polished porphyritic granite, the pride and wonder of the avenue along which they made a burnished and flashing peristyle.
Trotter rubbed his chin, meditatively, and once more examined the stone. Then he took a sudden deeper breath, and, leaning hurriedly forward, raked through the parcel with his fingers. He found nothing of note.
But as he sat there, stupidly staring at the fragment of granite, his crouching body, with his feet tucked in under the chair rungs, was startlingly like that familiar figure known as an interrogation mark.