THE PROFESSOR DEDUCES

From the open window (outside of which stood a tall ladder) at the end of the long hall, to a settee beneath a portrait of an eighteenth-century Scot in kilts, the set of muddy footprints was easily followed. There they ended.

“Maybe the bra’ laddie has ’em hid under yon kilts,” Inspector Kelley observed facetiously.

Twenty feet further down the hall the Professor reentered the bedroom where Donald McLennan lay in his bed, bludgeoned to death. Signaling Kelley to switch on the lights, he went to his knees. This time his thoroughness was rewarded.

From door to bed and return he observed under his glass a number of faint, incomplete right foot marks. He was confident they were made by a shoeless, tiptoeing person. Nowhere were impressions of a left foot found. A singular puzzling fact was that the prints were of a faint bluish color; the blue a trifle deeper in the center. The Professor explained to Kelley.

“So,” the Inspector snorted, “a one-legged pixie playing hopscotch on tiptoe bounces in here, ups with his shillelagh, conks the old gent, does a broken-toe dance, then exits blithely singing, ‘Armfuls of Purple!’”

Fordney chuckled as he regarded a dripping sky roofing a soggy world. Examining the muddy ladder he murmured, “Quite…”

“Quite what!” bellowed Kelley.

“Why, it’s quite evident how those footprints in the murder room were made,” answered Fordney. “A few simple deductions give us one negative and two positive clues concerning the killer’s dress. You see, Jim, he must have been wearing…”

This is a factual problem in deduction exclusively for supersleuths. What deductions did Fordney make from the footprints that enabled him to describe three points of the killer’s dress? Turn page for solution.