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 in the cellar--there was a singular contrivance attached. To one, a plain, everyday instrument for dispatching telegrams by the Morse system; to the other, a curious little keyboard which was an exact counterpart of the keyboard to the typewriter upstairs; and besides this there lay some remnants of food from the store cupboard of the house, and a sheaf of paper leaves covered with typewritten characters. "Gentlemen, the absolute end of the riddle at last," said Cleek as he took up one of those leaves. "Look at them--Government secrets every one. And I, like an ass, forgot to remember that Nicolo Ferrand was one of the cleverest mechanicians and one of the craftiest 'wire workers' that the underworld boasts. Look, Sir Charles; look, Mr. Narkom. Every touch of a letter on the keyboard of the typewriter upstairs registered its exact duplicate on this infernal contrivance down here, and fast as it was recorded, that vixen wired it on to Boris Borovonski. Can't you understand now why she left her post and flew to him? The shock which killed him and travelled with lessened force down the wire to the telegraph operator was felt here, and the instrument she used was, in all probability, disabled. She knew then, of course, that something had happened to her brother, and in a panic flew to find out what. "But even the shrewdest slip up sometimes and overlook things. Her foolish slip lay in this: that she forgot to take with her these original drafts of the intelligence she had wired to the dead man." "Ah, weel," said Mr. Alexander MacInery, who, like a true Scotsman, never liked to be found at the small end of the horn upon any occasion, "after all, 'tis no more than I expected. I said it was accident that was at the bottom of it, and accident it's turned out to be." "No doubt," agreed Cleek, with one of his peculiar smiles. "But, personally, I always like to think that there's a Power above, and when men--_and_ nations--have played the game squarely----Shan't we be going upstairs, Sir Charles? Mr. Narkom and I have a long ride back to town, and the afternoon is on the decline."