“You are right,” said King, with an evident attempt at calmness:  “I knew Manton.  He then wore a full beard and his hair long, but this is he.”

He might have added:  “I recognized him when he challenged Rosser.  I told Rosser and Sancher who he was before we played him this horrible trick.  When Rosser left this dark room at our heels, forgetting his outer clothing in the excitement, and driving away with us in his shirt sleeves—­all through the discreditable proceedings we knew whom we were dealing with, murderer and coward that he was!”

But nothing of this did Mr. King say.  With his better light he was trying to penetrate the mystery of the man’s death.  That he had not once moved from the corner where he had been stationed; that his posture was that of neither attack nor defense; that he had dropped his weapon; that he had obviously perished of sheer horror of something that he saw—­these were circumstances which Mr. King’s disturbed intelligence could not rightly comprehend.

Groping in intellectual darkness for a clew to his maze of doubt, his gaze, directed mechanically downward in the way of one who ponders momentous matters, fell upon something which, there, in the light of day and in the presence of living companions, affected him with terror.  In the dust of years that lay thick upon the floor—­leading from the door by which they had entered, straight across the room to within a yard of Manton’s crouching corpse—­were three parallel lines of footprints—­light but definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones those of small children, the inner a woman’s.  From the point at which they ended they did not return; they pointed all one way.  Brewer, who had observed them at the same moment, was leaning forward in an attitude of rapt attention, horribly pale.

“Look at that!” he cried, pointing with both hands at the nearest print of the woman’s right foot, where she had apparently stopped and stood.  “The middle toe is missing—­it was Gertrude!”

Gertrude was the late Mrs. Manton, sister to Mr. Brewer.

JOHN MORTONSON’S FUNERAL {1}

John Mortonson was dead:  his lines in “the tragedy ‘Man’” had all been spoken and he had left the stage.

The body rested in a fine mahogany coffin fitted with a plate of glass.  All arrangements for the funeral had been so well attended to that had the deceased known he would doubtless have approved.  The face, as it showed under the glass, was not disagreeable to look upon:  it bore a faint smile, and as the death had been painless, had not been distorted beyond the repairing power of the undertaker.  At two o’clock of the afternoon the friends were to assemble to pay their last tribute of respect to one who had no further need of friends and respect.  The surviving members of the family came severally every few minutes to the casket and wept above the placid features beneath the glass.  This did them no good; it did no good to John Mortonson; but in the presence of death reason and philosophy are silent.