This gave me no help. I turned the paper this way and that, but could make nothing of it. There was not a mark on it that I could discover, except the music and the scrawled title, “Flitterbat Lancers,” at the top. The paper was old, dirty, and cracked. What did it all mean? One might conceive of a person in certain circumstances sending a message--possibly an appeal for help--through a friend’s window, wrapped round a stone, but this seemed to be nothing of that sort. It was not a message, but a hastily written piece of music, with no bars or time marked, just as might have been put down by somebody anxious to make an exact note of an air, the time of which he could remember. Moreover, it was years old, not a thing just written in a recent emergency. What lunatic could have chosen this violent way of presenting me with an air from some forgotten “Flitterbat Lancers”? That indeed was an idea. What more likely than that the man taken away _was_ a lunatic and the others his keepers? A man under some curious delusion, which led him not only to fling his old music notes through my window, but to keep perfectly quiet while struggling for his freedom. I looked out of the window again, and then it seemed plain to me that the clinker and the paper could not have been intended for me personally, but had been flung at my window as being the only one that showed a light within a reasonable distance of the yard. Most of the windows about mine were those of offices, which had been deserted early in the evening. Once more I picked up the paper, and with an idea to hear what the ‘Flitterbat Lancers’ sounded like, I turned to my little pianette and strummed over the notes, making my own time and changing it as seemed likely. But I make nothing of it, and could by no means extract from the notes anything resembling an air. I considered the thing a little more, and half thought of trying Martin Hewitt’s office door, in case he might still be there and could offer a guess at the meaning of my smashed window and the scrap of paper. It was most probable, however, that he had gone home, and I was about resuming my social economy when Hewitt himself came in. He had stayed late to examine a bundle of papers in connection with a case just placed in his hands, and now, having finished, came to find if I were disposed for an evening stroll before turning in--a thing I was in the habit of. I handed him the paper and the piece of concrete, observing, “There’s a little job for you, Hewitt, instead of the stroll. What do those things mean?” And I told him the complete history of my smashed window. Hewitt listened attentively, and examined both the paper and the fragment of paving. “You say these people made absolutely no sound whatever?” he asked. “None but that of scuffling, and even that they seemed to do quietly.” “Could you see whether or not the two men gagged the other, or placed their hands over his mouth?”