“He said Chase came into the shop last week and told them he had been having trouble with his arches. He’d had the same trouble once before. And that other time he had been recommended to a man in New York who made shoes that helped him very much. He gave them the man’s address and had them send for this pair of tennis shoes for him. The shoes came two days ago. The clerks all studied them carefully because the ‘last’ was so peculiar. Cooley said he could swear to them. Then he proved it. Just inside the vamp he had scribbled Chase’s initials, ‘W. A. C.,’ in pencil, when they came to the shop. He had done it to make sure they wouldn’t get mixed up with the rest of the stock by some green clerk before Chase could call for them. And sure enough there were the initials. The shoes were Chase’s. Apparently he had kicked them off under the edge of the bed when he undressed.” The girl was staring at him in frank perplexity. “But,” she argued, “you just said the left shoe of that pair was the same shoe that had made the mark on the white woodwork of the window-sill when the murderer escaped. How could it----” “That’s the part of it none of us can understand. Chase couldn’t have killed himself and then walked to the window with his shoes on and stepped on the sill and then come back to bed and taken his shoes off and lain down again. Yet there isn’t any other solution. Don’t you see how crazily impossible the whole thing is? And the murderer couldn’t have been wearing Chase’s shoes and then stopped on the other side of the sill and taken them off and tossed them back under the bed. From the position of the window they couldn’t possibly have been thrown from there to the spot where we found them lying.” The girl’s puzzled eyes roamed to the veranda. Osmun Creede had halted the chief. Quimby was talking earnestly to him, presumably reciting the impossible tale of this latest development. Perhaps it may have been the effect of the light, but Doris as she watched half fancied she saw Osmun’s lean face grow greenish white and his jaw-muscles twitch convulsively as if in effort to keep steady his expression. But at once the real or fancied look was gone, and he was listening stolidly. “It must be a cruel blow to him,” she mused to herself, “to find still further proof that Thax is innocent. No wonder he seems so stricken!” Thaxton Vail interrupted her reverie by coming downstairs, carrying Clive’s suitcase and a light overcoat and hat. These he bore to the veranda and without a word handed them to Osmun. Creede took them in equal silence. Then as he turned to depart he favored Vail with an expressionless stare. “You’ve got more brain--more craft--than I gave you credit for, Thax,” he said abruptly. “They’ll never convict you.” He descended the steps and made off limpingly down the drive without waiting for further speech. CHAPTER XV THE IMPOSSIBLE