I felt very small as I listened to this reduction of my ideas to nothing. The specialist had not done. “I don’t think it would be at all hopeful to try to trace the skin, therefore. But I think it quite possible to trace something else. Do you remember what else about the costume the man Gerard described?” “Do you mean the necklace--of leopard’s claws?” I responded in doubt. “Yes. I see you don’t grasp the significance of the claws. I must tell you that the natives of the countries where leopards are found look upon the claws as having a magical virtue. They place a great value on them, and take them from the dead leopard at the first opportunity they find. It is almost impossible for the white man who shoots a leopard to secure the claws. I doubt if more than one entire set of claws comes to England in a year. Now you see that in my opinion we have a very much greater chance of tracing the claws than the skin.” I was fairly puzzled. I could follow Tarleton’s reasoning, of course, but I could not imagine how he meant to proceed. “These claws must have been brought home, according to my idea, by a sportsman and traveller of experience, who knew the ways of the natives, and was able to baffle them. Men of that class are not very numerous, and most of them have published books of their travels. I am going to spend the rest of the morning in going to the libraries and publishers; and I want you to spend it in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington.” There was no occasion for me to express the admiration I sincerely felt for my chief’s knowledge and resource. I waited in silent wonder for his instructions. “I am not an expert in zoölogy,” he said modestly. “I know, of course, that leopards, or animals closely resembling leopards, are found along the tropical zone. They are called jaguars in South America, I believe, and panthers elsewhere. At all events their skins are sufficiently like the true leopard’s to be called leopard skins by an ignorant man like Gerard. What I want you to do is to ascertain if such animals occur in the East Indian archipelago, and particularly in the Island of Sumatra.” It was a curious direction. What was there in the circumstances of the case to turn Sir Frank’s mind to one part of the tropics rather than another, and to one particular island? Perhaps it showed some dullness on my part; I can only confess that I had not the least idea of his motive. “Sumatra,” he repeated in a meditative tone, “almost the largest island in the world, and yet the least known. Nominally it is a Dutch possession, but the Dutch have never subjugated it. They have never thoroughly penetrated the interior. The natives have been too fierce for them to subdue. They occupy one or two points on the coast, I fancy, but that is all. There was a Sultan of Acheen who fought with them at one time. I don’t think he was really conquered. A very interesting field for an explorer willing to take his life in his hand.”