This apartment was his studio.  In addition to the sofa, it contained an ex-bureau, three chair-like shapes, a once marble-topped table, now covered with a sheet of zinc, two empty bird cages, and a condemned whatnot.  The walls were rather over-decorated in coloured chalks, the man-headed-snake motive predominating; they were also loopholed for firing into the hayloft.  Upon the table lay a battered spy-glass, minus lenses, and, nearby, two boxes, one containing dried corn-silk, the other hayseed, convenient for the making of amateur cigarettes; the smoker’s outfit being completed by a neat pile of rectangular clippings from newspapers.  On the shelves of the whatnot were some fragments of a dead pie, the relics of a “Fifteen-Puzzle,” a pink Easter-egg, four seashells, a tambourine with part of a girl’s face still visible in aged colours, about two thirds of a hot-water bag, a tintype of Hedrick, and a number of books:  several by Henty, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” “100 Practical Jokes, Easy to Perform,” “The Jungle Book,” “My Lady Rotha,” a “Family Atlas,” “Three Weeks,” “Pilgrim’s Progress,” “A Boy’s Life in Camp,” and “The Mystery of the Count’s Bedroom.”

The gloomy eye of Hedrick wandered to “The Mystery of the Count’s Bedroom,” and remained fixed upon it moodily and contemptuously.  His own mystery made that one seem tame and easy:  Laura’s bedroom laid it all over the Count’s, in his conviction; and with a soul too weary of pain to shudder, he reviewed the bafflements and final catastrophe of the preceding night.

He had not essayed the attempt upon the mattress until assured that the house was wrapped in slumber.  Then, with hope in his heart, he had stolen to Laura’s room, lit the lamp, feeling safe from intrusion, and set to work.  His implement at first was a long hatpin of Cora’s.  Lying on his back beneath the bed, and, moving the slats as it became necessary, he sounded every cubic inch of the mysterious mattress without encountering any obstruction which could reasonably be supposed to be the ledger.  This was not more puzzling than it was infuriating, since by all processes of induction, deduction, and pure logic, the thing was necessarily there.  It was nowhere else.  Therefore it was there.  It had to be there!  With the great blade of his Boy Scout’s knife he began to disembowel the mattress.

For a time he had worked furiously and effectively, but the position was awkward, the search laborious, and he was obliged to rest frequently.  Besides, he had waited to a later hour than he knew, for his mother to go to bed, and during one of his rests he incautiously permitted his eyes to close.  When he woke, his sisters were in the room, and he thought it advisable to remain where he was, though he little realized how he had weakened his shelter.  When Cora left the room, he heard Laura open the window, sigh, and presently a tiny clinking and a click set him a-tingle from head to foot:  she was opening the padlocked book.  The scratching sound of a pen followed.  And yet she had not come near the bed.  The mattress, then, was a living lie.