Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/246

 above the busy hand press. But no crevice was broad enough to permit him a glimpse of that room which he so wished to inspect.

The front of his narrow prison was shut off from the outer office by a partition of pine no heavier than that which ran along the side. And Kestner, when he realised that it would require no great effort to force a way through a barrier so flimsy, felt less disturbed in spirit. The worthy in the Stetson hat, he concluded, had merely taken an ordinary precaution to keep a new and untried recruit under surveillance. He had not imprisoned an acknowledged enemy. He had merely impounded an unstable adventurer who could later be made to serve certain desired ends.

Kestner returned to his study of the little chamber. Except for the counter and the tarpaulin he found it as bare as a cell. The one thing that worried him now was the loss of his shoes. But a source of even greater perplexity was the fact that he could see nothing of the printing-room next to him. And to investigate that printing-room was his first business in life.

He explored the partition wall, foot by foot. Then he took out his pocket-knife, squatted down at the inner end of the counter, and found two boards where the tongue and groove of the matched pine did not come close together.

He cut away the wood along this narrow fissure, timing each knife stroke to synchronise with the clank of the press. Each sliver and shaving of pine was brushed carefully up and hidden beneath the counter-end. And a ten-inch shift of the counter, he saw