CHAPTER XV THE STUDY OF FOOTPRINTS: THE BARE FOOT N the effort of the detective writers to create I an infallible sleuth Mark Twain took the wind out of everybody's sails. Neither Dupin, Lecoq; nor any of the celebrities of Nicholas Carter, could approach Archy Stillman. He was a modest, unassuming person. He made no pretensions and, what is incredible in a sleuth, he offered no explanations. But his method was unequaled. If he were shown a footprint that had been left behind by a criminal in his exit he would examine is very closely, like a person with exaggerated myopia. He would get down over the footprint, with his face nearly touching it. He would stare at it motionless for a few moments. Then he would get up and follow the trail of that unfortunate criminal through wood and field, over hill and dale, street and alley, cellar and housetop, where there was no sign, mark, or any visible physical evidence of a track; until finally he cornered him and turned him over to the amazed minions of the law. And he could do it in the dark! The marvelous skill of Archy Stillman was an amazing mystery until the inimitable humorist gave his charming explanation: The detective had been marked by a prenatal influence. His mother had been pursued by bloodhounds. Her son, though giving no physical evidence of a wonderful gift, had inherited the keen sense of smell that belonged to the bloodhounds which had put his mother in terror. It was by means of this naïve device that Mark Twain ridiculed what he believed to be the exaggerated deductions of Dupin, Lecoq and Holmes. One wonders what he would have thought of the deductions of the modern scientific criminologists. Even the gift of the bloodhound's nose hardly puts Mark Twain's in advance of these experts. If young Mr. Stillman were shown a footprint, he could trail down the assassin who had made it; but he could tell you nothing about him. But the modern scientific criminologist can tell you all about the assassin from his footprint, so that the police have only to go out and find him. When the Baron von R-was murdered in a city of Southeastern Europe, the police found on the floor beside the dead man a single track in a splash of blood. The body of the Baron, after his murder, had been placed in a chair, perhaps with the intention of creating the impression of suicide. But in going about his work the assassin had made the single footprint. The police at once sent to the university for the celebrated professor of criminology. He came, with a group of his students, to examine the footprint. He was a little, obese, bald man, with a military bearing, for he had been an officer in the Bohemian wars. He had a fine, acute face, with heavy, straight eyebrows-like lines of ebony set into the craggy brow-a large bony nose, and a grizzled mustache that bristled in the military fashion. He sat down on the floor beside the single footprint, with a small metal tape and a magnifying glass, not unlike the big reading glasses to be seen in this country. “This," he said, “is an imprint of a right bare foot, and therefore could not be that of the Baron, whose shoes have not been removed. It has a very high arch, and was made three hours ago. The man who made it was not standing still. He was walking when this imprint was made-probably leaving the room." Then he paused, measured the print very carefully with his tape, took out a pencil and made a calculation on a blank page of a notebook, and continued: "He is a thin man-very slender-six feet and one inch in height. He is a soldier and has been injured in the knee." Then he looked up at the police officials. "You can write down that description," he said, "and go out and find this assassin while I finish here, with this illustration, my lecture on scientific criminal investigation." The police went out, with what the French call a portrait parlé of the assassin-a slender soldier, six feet and one inch in height, with an injury to his right knee-while the professor of criminology, assembling his students, began his lecture on how he had arrived at these precise conclusions from the single footprint before him. He explained, first, that, where one was able to ex бой FIG. 6. FOOT WITH A HIGH ARCH FIG. 7. FLAT FOOT OR amine an imprint of any sort in blood before that medium had entirely dried, one ought to be able, by an accurate knowledge of the process of coagulation, to say with some degree of precision what time had elapsed since the formation of the imprint. In the case before him he was able to say that this imprint had been made three hours before his arrival. Any one could see that it was the print of a right foot. He knew the foot had a high arch-that is to say, it was unusually cambered-because the interior line of the print made a deep curve, cutting out a great segment of the print. He explained that a flat foot would leave the whole print of the foot, but as the foot was arched the print would lessen. Thus, in a foot with an excessive arch-highly cambered-not more than half of the surface of the foot would appear in the print. This was the case with the print before him. Consequently it was evident that the person who had made the print possessed a foot with an exceedingly high arch. (See Figures 6 and 7.) He knew that the assassin was walking at the time he made this track on the floor, because the print of the great toe was lengthened and ended in a sort of point. That was because one pressed the toe down in walking. If the track had been made by the assassin when standing still the print of the great toe would be round, because only the ball of the toe, in that case, would rest on the floor. (See Figures 8 and 9.) He went on to point out that it was always possible by the examination of a print to tell whether the person who had made it was, at the time, walking or standing still, since the track lengthened when one was in motion. Moreover, the print of the foot of one who is standing still is shorter and wider than |