"The Middle Toe of the Right Foot" is a ghost story by American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer Ambrose Bierce.
[1] The plot was apparently inspired by the front page Examiner news story from November 14, 1888, which described "an improbable duel with bowie knives in a suitably darkened room".
Ten years later he returns much altered to the neighborhood; and, being secretly recognized, is provoked into a bowie-knife duel in the dark, to be held in the now-abandoned house where his crime was committed.
When the moment of the duel arrives a trick is played upon him; and he is left without an antagonist, shut in a night-black ground floor room of the reputedly haunted edifice, "with the thick dust of a decade on every hand".
The only clue visible to the discoverers is one having supernatural implications: In the dust of years that lay thick upon the floor — leading from the door by which they had entered, straight across the room to within a yard of Manton's crouching corpse — were three parallel lines of footprints — light but definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones those of small children, the inner a woman's.