"Wait a bit! Wait a bit!" interposed Cleek, a trifle irritably. He had swung away from the window and was now walking up and down the room with short nervous steps, his chin pinched up between his thumb and forefinger, his brows knotted, and his eyes fixed upon the floor.
"Saffragam--Jaffna--Trincomalee! In all three of them--in all three!" he said, putting his running thoughts into muttered words. "And now a dead man sticks his fingers in his nostrils and talks of sapphires. Sapphires, eh? And the Saffragam district stuck thick with them as spangles on a Nautch girl's veil. The Bareva for a ducat! The Bareva Reef or I'm a Dutchman! And Barrington-Edwards was in that with the rest. So was Peabody; so was Miles; and so, too, were Lieutenant Edgburn and the Spaniard, Juan Alvarez. Eight of them, b'gad--eight! And I was ass enough to forget, idiot enough not to catch the connection until I heard again of Jim Peabody's web foot! But wait! Stop--there should be another marked foot if this is indeed a clue to the riddle, and so----"
He stopped short in his restless pacing and faced round on Mr. Narkom.
"Tell me something," he said in a sharp staccato. "The four other dead men--did any among them have an injured foot--the left or the right, I forget which--from which all toes but the big one had been torn off by a crocodile's bite, so that in life the fellow must have limped a little when he walked? Did any of the dead men bear a mark like that?"
"No," said Narkom. "The feet of all the others were normal in every particular."
"Hum-m-m! That's a bit of a setback. And I am either on the wrong track or Alvarez is still alive. What's that? Oh, it doesn't matter; a mere fancy of mine, that's all. Now let us get back to our mutton, please. You were going to tell me something about the right hand of the man with the web foot. What was it?"
"The palm bore certain curious hieroglyphics traced upon it in bright purple."
"Hieroglyphics, eh? That doesn't look quite so promising," said Cleek in a disappointed tone. "It is quite possible that there may be more than one web-footed man in the world, so of course----Hum-m-m! What were these hieroglyphics, Mr. Narkom? Can you describe them?"
"I can do better, my dear chap," replied the superintendent, dipping into an inner pocket and bringing forth a brown leather case. "I took an accurate tracing of them from the dead hand this morning, and--there you are. That's what's on his palm, Cleek, close to the base of the forefinger running diagonally across it."