“But I’m sure it’s something!” she insisted. “A note left in that peculiar way—a messenger afraid of being seen, and then, the way you act. It must be something.”
Larry laughed, though he did not feel at all gay at that moment.
“It’s just about an assignment, mother,” he said. “A new sort of clew—at least I hope it will be. It isn’t worth bothering about. Nothing at all to worry over. Let’s get to bed, it’s late. We had a very nice time, Molly and I—the show was very good,” and then, as if to prove what he said about the strange note being of no account, Larry crumpled it up as though to toss it aside. But he did not. Instead, he put it carefully in his pocket, crumpled as it was. He had an idea that he might trace where it came from, if he had time.
“There, that’s disposed of,” he remarked, with a forced note of cheerfulness in his voice. “To bed, mother.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself, Larry,” she remarked. “Molly is a very nice girl. Lucy likes her very much,” for Molly Mason had called on Larry’s sister several times, and the two girls had become good friends.
In the solitude of his own room, Larry took out the anonymous letter again, carefully smoothed out the wrinkles and creases, and looked at it carefully.
“It’s going to be mighty hard to trace that,” he reasoned. “It’s on plain paper, not even a water-mark in it, and it might have been written on almost any typewriter. If I had the time, or if it was worth it, I might find out what kind of a machine had been used, but I don’t believe I will.”
Larry recalled a number of cases, where, in the courts, certain disputed typewriting had been proved to have been done on a particular machine. More than this the very machine had been located, due to certain peculiarities, or defects, in the individual letters.
But, as the young reporter looked closely at the note, he could discover no faint marks, or breaks, in the type that might serve as a clew.
“I’d need a microscope to do it, anyhow,” he said to himself. “And then it would be too much of a task to hunt all over New York for the machine on which this was written.