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He was out after cheetahs, and having no more expectation of meeting with the nobler game than of encountering a lion, had not his tiger rifle with him. On coming to the banks of a small stream he was greatly surprised to see a tiger's fresh footmarks a big foot, too.
Excitedly he broke on the slumbers of his Indian companion, and after showing him the brooch, bade him accompany him to the place where he had found it, and there pointed to the footmarks on the river bank. "Can you read the meaning of those signs?" The Indian studied them as a white man would a cryptogram, and presently he stood up, and spoke with the slow gravity of his race.
Each picket had charge of a stretch of ground, and in the morning soldiers would ride sharply to right and left, covering it. They could tell, by footmarks on the dewy grass, whether any Kaffirs had been about in the night. The chief military officer was for falling back upon a less extended position, where he believed he could be more secure.
The house was still asleep. In the heavy odour of tobacco and various liqueurs which hung over everything, the furniture, the ceilings, the woodwork could be seen, already faded and still new. Spots on the crumpled satins, ashes staining the beautiful marbles, dirty footmarks on the carpets.
The prints of a man's feet were visible on the sand, and one of them had trodden down the plants, whose stems were still gently rising up again one after the other. "What did I tell you?" cried Bois-Rose. "Here are the tracks of a white man's feet, and I swear it is not ten minutes since he was here. These footmarks lead towards yonder cotton-trees." "In any case he is alone," suggested Fabian.
In the morning, however, they were all gone, but the footmarks of the Genet cats told how they had been removed. Some squeaks the next day in the chimney betrayed the presence of some very young ones, and a fire of damp grass being lighted, their destruction was completed by suffocation.
Some plants there were, indeed, trodden down by Dr. John in his search, and his hasty and heedless progress, which I wished to prop up, water, and revive; some footmarks, too, he had left on the beds: but these, in spite of the strong wind, I found a moment's leisure to efface very early in the morning, ere common eyes had discovered them.
Hewitt asked, pointing at the last footmark and then at the door, which was quite that distance away from it. "Besides," he added, opening the door, "there's no footprint here nor outside." The door opened on a lane, with another fence and a thick plantation of trees at the other side. Kentish looked at the footmarks, then at the door, then down the lane, and finally back toward the house.
No! if half a dozen men had been standing about here when one fell in or if two or three men had come here to throw another man in," he added significantly, "there'd be no footmarks. Try it you can't grind an iron-shod heel like mine into this turf." "It's all very horrible!" said Betty, still staring at the black gap with its suggestions of subterranean horror. "If one only knew "
The maid hurried upstairs, and mademoiselle repaired to an apartment where she could remove, so far as was possible, the footmarks left by those tears which she had shed when she had reflected upon the loneliness to which Mr. Mademoiselle had a dread of the acuteness of vision with which her maid was endowed.
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