matter."

"And you," I asked.

"Will do my part when you have done yours."

CHAPTER XVI. THE MARK OF THE RED CROSS

And what success did I meet? The best in the world. And by what means
did I attain it? By that of the simplest, prettiest clue I ever came
upon. But let me explain.

When after a wearisome day spent in an ineffectual search through the
neighborhood, I went home to my room, which as you remember was a front
one in a lodging-house on the opposite corner from Mr. Blake, I was so
absorbed in mind and perhaps I may say shaken in nerve, by the strain
under which I had been laboring for some time now, that I stumbled up an
extra flight of stairs, and without any suspicion of the fact, tried
the door of the room directly over mine. It is a wonder to me now that I
could have made the mistake, for the halls were totally dissimilar,
the one above being much more cut up than the one below, besides being
flanked by a greater number of doors. But the intoxication of the mind
is not far removed from that of the body, and as I say it was not till
I had tried the door and found it locked, that I became aware of the
mistake I had made.

With the foolish sense of shame that always overcomes us at the
committal of any such trivial error, I stumbled hastily back, when my
foot trod upon something that broke under my weight. I never let even
small things pass without some notice. Stooping, then, for what I had
thus inadvertently crushed, I carried it to where a single gas jet
turned down very low, made a partial light in the long hall, and
examining it, found it to be a piece of red chalk.

What was there in that simple fact to make me start and hastily recall
one or two half-forgotten incidents which, once brought to mind, awoke
a train of thought that led to the discovery and capture of those two
desperate thieves? I will tell you.

I don't remember now whether in my account of the visit I paid to
the Schoenmakers' house in Vermont, I informed you of the red cross I
noticed scrawled on the panel of one of the doors. It seemed a trivial
thing at the time and made little or no impression upon me, the chances
being that I should never have thought of it again, if I had not come
upon the article just mentioned at a moment when my mind was full of
those very Schoenmakers. But remembered now, together with another
half-forgotten fact,--that some days previous I had been told by the
woman who kept the house I was in,