here the creaking of some far-off shutter--possibly the one I
had seen swaying from the opposite side of the street--recalled me
to the duties of the hour, and, remembering that my investigations
were but half completed and that I might be interrupted any moment
by detectives from headquarters, I broke from the accursed charm,
which horrified me the moment I escaped it, and quitting the room
by a door at the farther end, sought to find in some of the adjacent
rooms the definite traces I had failed to discover on this, the
actual scene of the crime.

It was a dismal search, revealing at every turn the almost maddened
haste with which the house had been abandoned. The dining-room
especially roused feelings which were far from pleasant. The table,
evidently set for the wedding breakfast, had been denuded in such
breathless hurry that the food had been tossed from the dishes and
now lay in moldering heaps on the floor. The wedding cake, which
some one had dropped, possibly in the effort to save it, had been
stepped on; and broken glass, crumpled napery and withered flowers
made all the corners unsightly and rendered stepping over the
unwholesome floors at once disgusting and dangerous. The pantries
opening out of this room were in no better case. Shrinking from the
sights and smells I found there, I passed out into the kitchen and
so on by a close and narrow passage to the negro quarters clustered
in the rear.

Here I made a discovery. One of the windows in this long disused
portion of the house was not only unlocked but partly open. But as
I came upon no marks showing that this outlet had been used by the
escaping murderer, I made my way back to the front of the house and
thus to the stairs communicating with the upper floor.

It was on the rug lying at the foot of these stairs that I came upon
the first of a dozen or more burned matches which lay in a distinct
trail up the staircase and along the floors of the upper halls. As
these matches were all burned as short as fingers could hold them,
it was evident that they had been used to light the steps of some
one seeking refuge above, possibly in the very room where we had
seen the light which had first drawn us to this house. How then?
Should I proceed or await the coming of the "boys" before pushing
in upon a possible murderer? I decided to proceed, fascinated, I
think, by the nicety of the trail which lay before me.

But when, after a careful following in