began slowly and deliberately to circle the room. If his brain was so
restless and active that it must indulge in fantasies, it could at
least be diverted into another channel than--Jimmie Dale strained
forward suddenly in his chair. That was a pair of boots there at the
foot of the bed. There was nothing strange in a pair of boots, but these
boots were poised most curiously on their heels, with the toes pointing
upward. They just barely protruded from the foot of the bed, which
accounted for his not having been able to see them from the window when
he had flashed his light around--he could not see the upper portions of
them even now. And then, under his breath, Jimmie Dale jeered at himself
again. True, the boots were in a most peculiar position, but had his
nerves reached the state where a pair of boots would throw him into a
panic! How logical for some one to be hiding there under the bed--with
his feet in plain view! And yet what held the boots upright like that?
The foot of the bed itself? Jammed there, perhaps? Or--

"Damn it!" gritted Jimmie Dale. "I'm worse than a child to-night!"

He rose from his chair, stepped across the room to the foot of the
bed--and like a man dazed, his flashlight playing on the boots, his
automatic flung forward in his hand, he stood staring downward,
following his flashlight's ray with his eyes. Was he mad! Was his brain
now playing him some hideous trick! The boots were not empty, he could
see a man's ankles, the bottoms of a town's trousers; but the ankles and
the trousers seemed utterly insignificant--_on the sole of the right
boot was a diamond-shaped, gray-coloured, paper seal!_ His own
insignia--the insignia of the Gray Seal!

For an instant it might have been, he stood there rigidly, realising in
a sort of ghastly, subconscious way that the man under the bed made no