Arthur Upfield - The Devil_s Steps

“What do you make of those marks, George?” Bony asked.

“I-I don’t know, sir,” replied George. “They look-they look-”

“To me they look like a man’s boot-marks,” reiterated Bony. “See the way they are spaced here at this end. Are you ill, George?”

“No, sir. A slight headache, that’s all.”

The others gathered about them and George withdrew to collect the tea things from the table at which Miss Jade and Bony had been seated. Miss Jade pointed out the strange marks on her beautiful lawn. Everyone agreed that they looked just like a man’s tracks.

“The grass appears to have been burned straw-white, as though someone had poured acid on it,” remarked Downes.

“As though someone had walked down there in red-hot metal shoes,” supplemented Sleeman.“Never seen anything like it before.”

“Must be the Devil walking about,” Downes said. “Now I wonder just how that happened.”

Miss Jade spoke, and there was anger in her voice.

“Then why didn’t he walk along the path, which is only three or four feet to the left? Perhaps that casual man knows something about it.”

She was the first to leave the veranda, going down the steps to the path running parallel with the veranda, and then along the path going down to the wicket gate. The large Mrs. Watkins followed with her husband. After them went Sleeman and Lee. Downes sped a swift glance at George, and Bony looked that way, too, to observe the steward standing by the table, both hands holding the tea utensils, and looking outward over the lawn. Then Downes went down the steps and Bony followed him.

Bagshott in the News

“FRED, HOW DO those marks come to be there?” asked Miss Jade, her eyes wide and blazing at the unfortunate man. Fred removed his ancient felt hat, sniffed, and regarded the marks with an expression on his face of profound misery. Then he looked again into the dark eyes still concentrated upon him.

“I don’t know, marm,” he said. “I’ve only just noticed ’em.”

“Only just noticed them!” echoed Miss Jade. “Why, you have been cutting this section of the lawn all the afternoon. Whatd’youmean- you’ve only just noticed them?”

It was a difficult question to answer and Fred made no attempt. He gazed sadly down the slope at the marks laid upon the velvety green in almost a straight line. Then, as though relieved of great responsibility, he walked on down behind Bony, who was slowly moving away, his hands behind him, his head bent forward.

The marks of the boots or shoes were as distinct as though they had been made on soft sand. The size of the footwear which had made the marks was number twelve.

Each stamp of the boot or shoe was almost perfect, almost, but lacking in several important essentials. Such a mark made on sand would have revealed to Bony peculiarities such as areas of greatest pressure and the exact manner in which the person who had made the marks lifted his feet off the ground. Those peculiarities were the vital tell-tales. The grass was not able to reveal the vital peculiarities-it could only register the flat impression of the soles of the boots or shoes.

Arriving at the edge of the still-uncut portion of the lawn, Bony saw how he had come to miss seeing the marks when walking up the path before lunch. The uncut grass was approximately two inches in length and was lying at various angles from the perpendicular. The “burned” patches could be seen among this uncut grass, but not so clearly as when the grass was cut. Bony could see that the man whose feet had made the marks had gone on down the lawn to the bottom, and then had turned abruptly to reach the path just above the wicket gate.

Along the inside of the wire fence running above the top of the road bank there was left a strip of some four feet which had never been cut by a mower, and the grass along this strip was high, about nine or ten inches, and very rank and coarse.

Bony stood on the inside of the wicket gate and regarded the surface of the ramp leading down to the road. It was fairly soft. He saw his own foot-marks made this day. Those left when on his way from the house were overlaid by others, but those made on his return were undamaged right down to the road, indicating that he had been the last to come up the ramp to the gate. He saw the foot-tracks left by Mr. and Mrs. Watkins, by Fred, by Lee and Sleeman, and by people he did not know, and later he learned that the strangers to him had been four people who had called to visit the Watkins couple.

Miss Jade and her several guests were still standing in a group at the top side of the lawn. Fred was standing aimlessly beside his lawn mower. Downes was mid-way between Fred and himself, walking slowly beside the line of tracks. And slowly Bony began to walk to meet him.

“Mighty strange,” observed Downes a moment later, when they both returned to the edge of the uncut portion of the lawn.

“Very,” Bony agreed. “I don’t understand it. Do you?”

Downes shook his head.

Bony sank to his knees to bring his eyes nearer one of the tracks. The grass was notburned, it was merely dead-quite dead, dead right down to the soil. All over the lawn the grass was growing thickly. Bony took a pen-knife from a pocket of his coat and with its point began to loosen the earth at the roots of the dead grass. Then, with his fingers, he teased upwards several roots, to find that near the surface they were also dead. Only down at a depth of an inch and a half did he discover living roots.

He rose to his feet and walked down to the uncut portion of lawn, and again went to his knees beside one of the tracks. Here he moved aside the slightly overhanging living grass, laying bare the dead herbage. A blade of this he picked, finding it exceedingly brittle but not to the degree that he could powder it between the palms of his hands. It had certainly not been burned with heat or with acid. It had merely died like ripe wheat stalks.

Plucking a handful of the dead grass, he rose to his feet and presented the grass for Downes’s inspection. Downes took some of it, held it closer to his eyes and felt it with his finger-tips.

“It doesn’t look as though it had been burned by anything, does it?” he said in his cold and precise voice.

“No,” Bony agreed. “It appears to have died quite naturally. Yet it cannot be a natural phenomenon for it to have died in areas like those which obviously are shaped like a man’s boot soles. It lies outside my experience.”

“And mine, too,” Downes said, and dropping the grass he had taken from Bony’s hand, he turned to walk up towards Miss Jade and those with her. Bony ostensibly tossed away the grass he had plucked, but he concealed a quantity which he thrust into a pocket.

Fred proceeded with the cutting. Several of the group at the same time asked for the answer to this riddle, and neither Bony nor Downes could supply it.

“It’s the most remarkable thing I’ve ever seen,” Sleeman burst out.“Must have been the Devil who rose straight up from Hell to take a walk on your lawn, Miss Jade. And what large feet, too!”

When he placed one of his own shoes over a mark there was a wide edging left all round it.

“What size do you take?” asked Downes.

“Seven,” Sleeman replied. “Oh, I didn’t make those marks. You can all see that.”

“It’s aman’s foot-marks, isn’t it?” shrilled Mrs. Watkins, and her husband assured her that it was.

“Wonder when it was done?” asked Lee, the squatter. “I’ve never seen the like of it. Why, a man having that size feet must be bigger than I am.”

“Or a man smaller than you but having deformed feet or diseased feet,” added Downes. He noticed George standing at the top of the veranda steps. “Just a moment, George!” he called.