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.

Following that wire's course, they, too, descended until, in the
fulness of time, the end was reached in a far corner of the cellar
underneath the building.

There, behind an upturned empty cask, they came upon yet another
wire, which wound upward, and was found afterward to travel out and
up beside the "leader" until it joined the private wire of the
dockyard just outside the dormer window of what had once been Miss
Greta Hilmann's bedroom. And to these wires--the one descending and
the other ascending from behind that empty cask