complied, and he did the same. Then Holmes led me down
the corridor to Thorneycroft's room, and noiselessly opened the door.

"I'm going to steal his shoes," he whispered.

"Steal his shoes! What the----" I began under my breath; but I
subsided as Holmes tightened his warning grip on my arm and tiptoed
quietly into the bedchamber of the sleeping secretary. He took the
pair of shoes under the chair beside the bed, and then just as quietly
passed out, closing the door behind us.

Only a dimly flickering gas-light on the wall of the corridor
illuminated the strange scene as we left Thorneycroft's room, and
Holmes tiptoed along in his stocking feet to the next room, inhabited
by Lord Launcelot, the Earl's brother.

"Say, are you going to swipe all their shoes, Holmes?" I whispered in
his ear, as we softly opened Launcelot's door. "If you don't look out,
there'll be another detective from London sent down here to
investigate their disappearance!"

"Oh, shut up, you old duffer!" he answered irritably. "Can't you ever
learn anything after all your long association with me? If you can't
do anything else right, at least keep still, and don't arouse these
sleeping dummies."

I obeyed, and so the two of us gradually worked our way around to the
four other rooms, taking the shoes we found beside the bed in each
room, until we had six pairs of them--Thorneycroft's, Lord
Launcelot's, Uncle Tooter's, Billie Hicks's, Billie Budd's (who,
fortunately for Holmes's purposes, had left a pair of shoes in his
room, and had escaped that afternoon in another pair) and even the
Countess's. I demurred considerably at burglarizing her room and
stealing her dainty high-heeled shoes; but the cold-blooded Holmes
would stop at nothing, and took her shoes along with the rest. And the
worst part of it was that he made me carry them all! Toting around a
large and awkward collection of six pairs of shoes in my arms, through
the dark corridors of an ancient castle in the middle of the night,
was certainly something new in my sleuthing experience, and I so
expressed myself when we finally got back to our own room, and Holmes
had closed the door behind us. I laid down the pile of shoes on the
floor in one corner of the room, and grumbled:

"I've done a good many funny things since I took up this job of being
your side-partner, Holmes, but I never thought I'd sink so low as to
go sneaking around into people's rooms while they're asleep and steal
thei