“You’ve found out something, I know!” he cried. “What is it, old chap—eh?”
“Let me alone, let me alone!” flung back Cleek, irritably. “I want the dockmaster! I want him at once! Where is the man? Oh, there you are, Mr. Beachman. Speak up—quickly. Was that ‘Hilmann’ woman ever allowed to enter this room? Did she ever make use of this typewriter at any time?”
“Yes, sir—often,” he replied. “She was one of the best and most careful typists I ever saw. Used to attend to all my correspondence for me and——Good God, man, what are you doing? Don’t you know that that thing’s Government property?”
For Cleek, not waiting for him to finish what he was saying, had suddenly laid hands on the machine, found it screwed fast to the table and, catching up the nearest chair, was now smashing and banging away at it with all his force.
“Government destruction, you mean!” he gave back sharply. “Didn’t I tell you she was a very demon of ingenuity, stupid? Didn’t I say——Victory! Now then, look here—all of you! Here’s a pretty little contrivance, if you like.”
He had battered the typewriter from its fastenings and sent it crashing to the floor, a wreck, not ten seconds before; now, his hand, which, immediately thereafter, had been moving rapidly over the surface of the sound-deadening square of felt beneath, whisked that, too, from the table, and let them all see the discovery he had made.
Protruding from the surface of that table and set at regular intervals there were forty-two needle points of steel—one for each key of the typewriter—which a moment before had pierced the felt’s surface just sufficient to meet the bottom of the “key” above it, and to be driven downward when that key was depressed.
Spectacular as ever in these times, he faced about and gave his hand an outward fling.
“Gentlemen, the answer to the riddle,” he said. “You have been supplying her with the needed information yourselves. A ducat to a door knob, every time a letter was struck on this machine its exact duplicate was recorded somewhere else. Get a saw, Mr. Beachman, and let us see to what these steel points lead.”
They led to a most ingenious contrivance, as it turned out. A highly sensitive spiral spring attached to an “arm” of thin, tough steel beneath the surface of the table communicated with a rigid wire running down the wall behind one of that table’s back legs and, passing thence through a small gimlet-hole in the floor, descended and disappeared.