The lettering on the matchbox could be seen in the silvered mirror, enlarged to such a point that the letters were plainly visible!
“Think of the possibilities in that,” he added excitedly. “I saw them at once. You can read what some one is writing at a desk a hundred, perhaps two hundred feet away.”
“Yes,” I cried, more interested in the practical aspects of it than in the mechanics and optics. “What have you found?”
“Some one came into the boathouse while you were away,” he said. “He had a note. It read, ‘Those new detectives are watching everything. We must have the evidence. You must get those letters to-night, without fail.’”
“Letters—evidence,” I repeated. “Who wrote it? Who received it?”
“I couldn’t see over the hedge who had entered the boathouse, and by the time I got around here he was gone.”
“Was it Wickham—or intended for Wickham?” I asked.
Kennedy shrugged his shoulders.
“We’ll gain nothing by staying here,” he said. “There is just one possibility in the case, and I can guard against that only by returning to Verplanck’s and getting some of that stuff I brought up here with me. Let us go.”
Late in the afternoon though it was, after our return, Kennedy insisted on hurrying from Verplanck’s to the Yacht Club up the bay. It was a large building, extending out into the water on made land, from which ran a long, substantial dock. He had stopped long enough only to ask Verplanck to lend him the services of his best mechanician, a Frenchman named Armand.