on guard having strolled a few feet away, I approached the
open doorway without hindrance, and at once took that close look I had
promised myself, of the marks which I had observed scrawled broadly
across the floor just inside the threshold. They were as interesting and
fully as important as I had anticipated. Though nearly obliterated by
the passing of the policeman's feet across them, I was still enabled to
read the one word which appeared to me significant.

If you will glance at the following reproduction of a snap-shot which I
took of this scrawl, you will see what I mean.

[Illustration]

The significant character was the 16. Taken with the "ust," there could
be no doubt that the whole writing had been a record of the date on
which the child had disappeared: August 16, 190-.

This in itself was of small consequence if the handwriting had not
possessed those marked peculiarities which I believed belonged to but
one man--a man I had once known--a man of reverend aspect, upright
carriage and a strong distinguishing mark, like an old-time scar,
running straight down between his eyebrows. This had been my thought
when I first saw it. It was doubly so on seeing it again after the
doubts expressed by Miss Graham of a threatening old man who possessed
similar characteristics.

Satisfied on this point, I turned my attention to what still more
seriously occupied it. The three or four long rugs, which hung from the
ceiling across the whole wall at my left, evidently concealed the
mysterious partition put up in Mr. Ocumpaugh's father's time directly
across this portion of the room. Was it a totally unbroken partition? I
had been told so; but I never accept such assertions without a personal
investigation.

Casting a glance through the doorway and seeing that it would take my
dreaming friend, the policeman, some two or three minutes yet to find
his way back to his post, I hastily lifted these rugs aside, one after
the other, and took a look behind them. A stretch of Georgia pine, laid,
as I readily discovered by more than one rap of my knuckles, directly
over the bricks it was intended to conceal, was visible under each; from
end to end a plain partition with no indications of its having been
tampered with since the alterations were first made.

Dismissing from my mind one of those vague possibilities, which add such
interest to the calling of a detective, I left the place, with my full
thought concentrated on the def