Higgins, who was the optimist of the party, a small man, with the unlined, clear complexion and face of a boy, shrugged his shoulders a little doubtfully.

“That’s all very well, Weiss,” he said, “but if Phineas had been going to find us out at all, he’d have found us out three weeks ago, when the thing started.  He wouldn’t have sat still and let us sell ten million dollars’ worth of stock without moving his little finger.  I guess you’ve got the jumps, Weiss, all because we were d-----d fools enough to sign that rotten paper last night.  All the same I don’t quite see how he could ever use that against us.  His own name’s there.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Weiss said quietly.  “I tell you it occurred to me to look across just as he was blotting the page, and I saw that he had his arm right round the paper, and it didn’t seem to me that he was blotting the place where his signature ought to have been.”

“Why didn’t you ask to read the thing through again?” Higgins demanded.

“I wish I had,” Weiss answered gloomily.

Bardsley, a large man, with grey beard and moustache, and coarse, hard face, spoke for the first time.

“Do any of you know,” he asked, “whereabouts in that infernal little room of his Duge keeps his papers?”

Weiss looked up.

“I am not sure,” he said.  “I know that he has a small iron strong-box screwed into the inside of his roll-top desk, and of course there is a safe in the outer office; but I don’t see how we’re going to find out whether the paper we want is there.”

“The girl seemed a fool,” Higgins remarked.  “Can’t she be got at?”

“I have done my best,” Weiss answered.  “It strikes me she’s just fool enough to stick to what she’s been told, and she’s too scared of her uncle to do more or less.  She practically turned me out of his room this morning, when I was just having a look round.”

“If there is really anything,” Higgins said in a soft voice, “in what Weiss is hinting at, there’s only one thing for us to do, and, difficult or easy, it’s got to be done, even if we use our friends from down there.”

He motioned with his head toward the window which was behind them, and which looked out over the river.  They were all three silent for a moment.  Then Weiss struck the table lightly with his clenched fist.

“Fools that we are!” he muttered—­“babies! idiots!  To think that such men as Bardsley and Higgins and myself are compelled to make use of criminals, to put ourselves practically in fear of the law, to get back a paper which we signed like babes in the wood.  What if this illness of Duge’s is a fake!  Nowadays a man doesn’t need to move from his room to do mischief in this world.”

“I’ve been round to his broker’s this morning,” Higgins remarked.  “He is doing nothing, has done nothing for weeks.  He left off the day we all agreed to leave off.”

“Why couldn’t he be doing as we’ve done,” Bardsley remarked, “and work from Chicago or Boston?”