“We’d better go through everything in the room,” decided Bob’s uncle, and they got down on their hands and knees and started rummaging through the litter of papers.
It would take days to place these back in their proper sequences and Bob felt sorry for Jacobs.
They finished one side of the room and started down another. There was no sign of the missing envelope and Bob’s uncle phoned the precinct police station to learn if such an envelope had been found on the prisoner.
“Search him again,” he instructed the police when they informed him that no envelope or papers of any description had been found.
Bob looked toward the half opened window.
“Do you think it would have been possible for him to toss that paper out the window and have it picked up by someone on the ground?” he asked.
Merritt Hughes went to the window and looked down. It was better than a hundred feet to the ground and the sharpness of the wind had not lessened. He shook his head.
“I don’t think that happened,” he said. “It would have been too risky. Either that paper is still in this room or it was taken out by that fellow when he left.”
“But the police haven’t found anything,” protested Bob.
“Sometimes even the police slip up when they run into an especially clever crook and this man had to be clever to get in here in a guard’s uniform and stand night duty.”