"They were, I dare say, for he kept pointing out this one and that to me and saying, 'That's so and so!' as they danced past us. I shouldn't know any of them again, so far as looks are concerned, for the annual French Ball in New York is a masked ball, as you are, perhaps, aware; and I shouldn't know 'Dutch Ella' any better than the rest, but for one thing--although I danced with her."
"Yes. For the purpose of 'getting a line on her shape,' so to speak, for possible future reference. I couldn't see her face, for she was masked to the very chin; but there's a curious, tumor-like lump, as big as a hen's egg, just under her right shoulder-blade, and there's the scar of an acid burn on the back of her left hand that she'll carry to her grave. I shall know that scar if ever I see it again. And if by any chance I should run foul of a woman bearing one like it, and that woman should prove to have also a lump under the right shoulder-blade----Come along! Let's get out and see if we can find one. 'Time flies,' as the anarchist said when he blew up the clock factory. Let's toddle."
They "toddled" forthwith, but on a fruitless errand, as it proved. Nevertheless, they "toddled" again the next day as hopefully as ever; and the next after that, and the next again, yet at the end of the fourth they were no nearer any clue to the whereabouts of Dutch Ella and Diamond Nick than they had been in the beginning. If, as Cleek sometimes fancied, they had not merely passed through England on their way to the Continent, but were still here, housed like hawks in a safe retreat from which they made predatory excursions under the very noses of the police, there was nothing to signalize it. No amazing jewel theft, no affair of such importance as one engineered by them would be sure to be, had as yet been reported to the Yard; and for all clue there was to their doings or their whereabouts one might as well have set out to find last summer's roses or last winter's snow as hope to pick it up by any method as yet employed.
Thus matters stood when on the morning of the fifth day Cleek elected to make Hampstead Heath and its environments the scene of their operations, and at nine o'clock set forth in company with the superintendent to put them into force in that particular locality, with the result that by noontime they found themselves in the thick of as pretty a riddle as they had fallen foul of in many a day.