"Well, now what do you think o' that?" he demanded, still grinning.
"I knew that would attract your attention, just as it did," said The Thinking Machine, "and if you really found out what it was it would be a sort of gentle rebuke."
"What did you write it with?" asked Dr. Ransome, after he had examined the linen and passed it to Mr. Fielding.
"This," said the erstwhile prisoner, and he extended his foot. On it was the shoe he had worn in prison, though the polish was gone--scraped off clean. "The shoe blacking, moistened with water, was my ink; the metal tip of the shoe lace made a fairly good pen."
The warden looked up and suddenly burst into a laugh, half of relief, half of amusement.
"You're a wonder," he said, admiringly. "Go on."
"That precipitated a search of my cell by the warden, as I had intended," continued The Thinking Machine. "I was anxious to get the warden into the habit of searching my cell, so that finally, constantly finding nothing, he would get disgusted and quit. This at last happened, practically."
The warden blushed.
"He then took my white shirt away and gave me a prison shirt. He was satisfied that those two pieces of the shirt were all that was missing. But while he was searching my cell I had another piece of that same shirt, about nine inches square, rolled into a small ball in my mouth."
"Nine inches of that shirt?" demanded the warden. "Where did it come from?"