"You see it?" he asked.
"Yes," I answered, my voice trembling. "I see it."
"Very well," he said. "Now, we know where we are."
XXII
There was not much to see when I unrolled the scroll, and inspected it against the lamplight, as McGinity had directed, but what there was assured me that the reporter was right when he said that he had made a find. Now, we knew something.
For a moment, the discovery completely overwhelmed me; I felt a little giddy. It affected me personally, more closely than anything I had ever had to deal with, mainly because of Henry. A sort of vision rose before my eyes. I saw the whole thing about Mars exposed, and my brother crushed in ignominy.
What the reporter had found was in line with what had been running in both our minds, the conviction that a superior intellect was at the bottom of all this Martian mystery, and its various resultants. It revealed a carefully conceived, highly ingenious conspiracy; a cruel and cold-blooded fraud, done in such a fashion as to leave no clue, which would make the tracing of the adroit and utterly unscrupulous perpetrator concerned, very difficult, if not impossible.
But here was a clue, thanks to McGinity's power of observation and reportorial inquisitiveness, even if it was only the ghost of one, that might put us on to the track of the perpetrator. A water-mark, a small translucent design, appeared in the body of the parchment paper, which proved that the scroll had not been made on Mars, but on earth. There it was, as plain as day: "Royal Bond—Made in U. S. A."
McGinity's reportorial and detective instincts combined—all newspaper reporters seem to have been born with a detective complex—quickly sent him again to the secretary, this time to look for a Manhattan telephone book; and while he was thumbing hastily through its pages, I took another squint at the water-mark, in the parchment scroll. I could hardly believe my eyes.