He held the cap as before, and the foreman carefully picked out with the cold chisel the sawdust surrounding the fingers. As its level lowered, the remainder of the hand and the wrist gradually became revealed. The sight of the whole only accentuated the first impression of dainty beauty and elegance. Broughton emptied the cap on to the top of the cask. Three more sovereigns were found hidden in it, and these he pocketed with the others. Then he turned to re-examine the cask. It was rather larger than the wine-barrels, being some three feet six high by nearly two feet six in diameter. As already mentioned, it was of unusually strong construction, the sides, as shown by the broken stave, being quite two inches thick. Owing possibly to the difficulty of bending such heavy stuff, it was more cylindrical than barrel shaped, the result being that the ends were unusually large, and this no doubt partly accounted for Harkness’s difficulty in upending it. In place of the usual thin metal bands, heavy iron rings clamped it together. On one side was a card label, tacked round the edges and addressed in a foreign handwriting: ‘M. Léon Felix, 141 West Jubb Street, Tottenham Court Road, London, W., via Rouen and long sea,’ with the words ‘Statuary only’ printed with a rubber stamp. The label bore also the sender’s name: ‘Dupierre et Cie., Fabricants de la Sculpture Monumentale, Rue Provence, Rue de la Convention, Grenelle, Paris.’ Stencilled in black letters on the woodwork was ‘Return to’ in French, English, and German, and the name of the same firm. Broughton examined the label with care, in the half-unconscious hope of discovering something from the handwriting. In this he was disappointed, but, as he held the hand-lamp close, he saw something else which interested him. The label was divided into two parts, an ornamental border containing the sender’s advertisement and a central portion for the address. These two were separated by a thick black line. What had caught Broughton’s eye was an unevenness along this line, and closer examination showed that the central portion had been cut out, and a piece of paper pasted on the back of the card to cover the hole. Felix’s address was therefore written on this paper, and not on the original label. The alteration had been neatly done, and was almost unnoticeable. Broughton was puzzled at first, then it occurred to him that the firm must have run out of labels and made an old one do duty a second time. ‘A cask containing money and a human hand--probably a body,’ he mused. ‘It’s a queer business and something has got to be done about it.’ He stood looking at the cask while he thought out his course of action.