“Don’t happen to have a pocket flashlight, do you?” he asked.
“No.”
He said, “I’ve been looking down here with a match, but it’s rather dangerous. An end may drop off the match, and set the whole thing afire.”
He struck a match, shielded the flame with his hand for a moment, then pushed his arm down inside the place where the drawer had been. “Take a look down there,” he said.
Back down in the lower part of the desk I could see a litter of papers; then the match flickered out.
“Can’t we get at them by taking the lower drawers out?” I asked.
“No. I’ve tried that. There’s a partition back of the lower drawers. See?”
He pulled out one of the lower drawers. A solid partition was behind it. It left a space some six or eight inches between the back of the drawer and the back of the desk.
Hale said, “You see how it is. The upper drawer was made very deep so it would hold the desk blotter. The lower drawers aren’t as deep by some eight inches. There was that much dead space in the desk.”
I was curious now. “Not one chance in a hundred any of those papers concern the girl we want, but seeing we’ve gone this far, we may as well get them out.”