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, that the parties over
my head (two men and a woman I believe she said) were giving her some
trouble, but that they paid well and therefore she did not like to
turn them out,--it aroused a vague suspicion in my mind, and led to my
walking back to the door I had endeavored to open in my abstraction,
and carefully looking at it.
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