and startlingly more
specific:

"DANGER! IF FOUND DESTROY AT ONCE. Do Not Touch With Bare Hands."

There was nothing else. Gingerly, Average Jones detached the sign. The
cabinet proved to be empty. He pushed a rock into it, lifted it on the
end of a stick and dropped it overboard. One after another eight little
fishes glinted up through the water, turned their white bellies to the
sunlight and bobbed, motionless. The investigator hastily threw away the
label and cast his gloves after it. But on his return to the city he
was able to give a reproduction of the writing to Professor Gehren which
convinced that anxious scholar that Harvey Craig had been alive and able
to write not long before the time when the houseboat was set adrift.

CHAPTER V. THE MERCY SIGN--TWO

Some days after the recovery of the houseboat, Average Jones sat at
breakfast, according to his custom, in the cafe of the Hotel Palatia.
Several matters were troubling his normally serene mind. First of these
was the loss of the trail which should have led to Harvey Craig. Second,
as a minor issue, the Oriental papers found in the deserted Bellair
Street apartment had been proved, by translation, to consist mainly of
revolutionary sound and fury, signifying, to the person most concerned,
nothing. As for the issue of the Washington daily, culled from the
houseboat, there was, amidst the usual melange of social, diplomatic,
political and city news, no marked passage to show any reason for its
having been in the possession of "Smith." Average Jones had studied and
restudied the columns, both reading matter and advertising, until he
knew them almost by heart. During the period of waiting for his order
to be brought he was brooding over the problem, when he felt a
hand-pressure on his shoulder and turned to confront Mr. Thomas Colvin
McIntyre, solemn of countenance and groomed with a supernal modesty of
elegance, as befitted a rising young diplomat, already Fifth Assistant
Secretary of State of the United States of America.

"Hello, Tommy," said the breakfaster. "What'll you have to drink? An
entente cordialer?"

"Don't joke," said the other. "I'm in a pale pink funk. I'm afraid to
look into the morning papers."

"Hello! What have you been up to that's scandalous?"

"It isn't me," replied the diplomat ungrammatically. "It's Telfik Bey."

"Telfik Bey? Wait a minute. Let me think." The name had struck a
response from some thought wire within Avera