Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/241

 fact that two doors opened through a wooden partition across the back of the room. And from behind one of these doors came the sound of machinery, the rhythmic clatter and thump of what could be only a bed press in operation.

"Got a printin' plant back there?" he somnolently inquired as he sniffed the betraying smell of benzine.

"Sure," said the other man, pulling open one of the desk drawers and flinging a form-pad on the battered table-top. His next movement was one of impatience. "You sign here," he said as a stubby forefinger touched the bottom of the pad.

"I do a little printin' myself," amiably persisted the new recruit. He sat stiffly down at the desk and took up a pen. Then he leaned close over the form, possessed of a sudden desire to conceal his face. For on the floor, at one end of the desk where he sat, stood a gallon can—a can from which the top had been cut away. Yet the insignia and the lettering on this can testified to the fact that it must recently have held olive oil. And oil, Kestner knew, could have been poured readily enough from the unsealed spout in a corner of the severed top. What startled him, however, was the discovery that the can bore the same stamp as those which had been stored full of sand and counterfeit paper in the Lambert printing-plant at Palermo.

Kestner, as he leaned in sleepy dejection over the printed form and scrawlingly attached a signature to its bottom, was not as absentminded as his appearance implied. He could see that the shooting-gallery abovestairs was merely a trap to gather in