Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/177

 yield and let the lid fall back. A moment later he was going through the contents.

The first thing on which his wavering pencil of light fell was a methodic bundle of blue-prints, each print folded to the size of a legal envelope, and each backed by several pages of typewritten matter and enigmatic rows of figures, interspersed with small designs, the nature of which the man with the flashlight had no time to determine. But what impressed him, even in that cursory survey, was the care and neatness with which each document had been prepared and filed away. On the back of each, he also discovered, stood a methodically penned descriptive-title, and he stooped closer to decipher these titles. Then he stopped and took a fuller breath, as though an unlooked-for shock had imposed on him the necessity of some prompt mental readjustment. For the documents into which he had peered at haphazard were labelled as follows:—

Kestner would have read more, for that list most acutely appealed to his professional curiosity. But the chance to delve deeper into the package, he saw, was suddenly lost to him. His first instinctive movement was to quench his flash-light. His next was to