“Now, this is what happened.  A picture was taken of Cadwalader Brown’s automobile, probably at rest, with Brown in it.  The matter of faking Travis or any one else by his side is simple.  If with an enlarging lantern the image of this faked picture is thrown on the paper like a lantern slide, and if the right hand side is a little further away than the left, the top further away than the bottom, you can print a fraudulent high speed ahead picture.  True, everything else in, the picture, even if motionless, is distorted, and the difference between this faking and the distortion of the shutter can be seen by an expert.  But it will pass.  In this case, however, the faker was so sure of that that he was careless.  Instead of getting the plate further from the paper on the right he did so on the left.  It was further away on the bottom than on the top.  He got distortion all right, enough still to satisfy the uninitiated.  But it was distortion in the wrong way!  The top of the wheel, which goes fastest and ought to be most indistinct, is, in the fake, as sharp as any other part.  It is a small mistake, but fatal.  That picture is really at high speed—­backwards!  It is too raw, too raw.”

“You don’t think people are going to swallow all that stuff, do you?” asked Hanford coolly, in spite of the exposures.

Kennedy paid no attention.  He was looking at McLoughlin.  The Boss was regarding him surlily.  “Well,” he said at length, “what of all this?  I had nothing to do with it.  Why do you come to me?  Take it to the proper parties.”

“Shall I?” asked Kennedy quietly.

He had uncovered another picture carefully.  We could not see it, but as he looked at it McLoughlin fairly staggered.

“Wh—­where did you get that?” he gasped.

“I got it where I got it, and it is no fake,” replied Kennedy enigmatically.  Then he appeared to think better of it.  “This,” he explained, “is what is known as a pinhole photograph.  Three hundred years ago della Porta knew the camera obscura, and but for the lack of a sensitive plate would have made photographs.  A box, thoroughly light-tight, slotted inside to receive plates, covered with black, and glued tight, a needle hole made by a number 10 needle in a thin sheet of paper—­and you have the apparatus for lensless photography.  It has a correctness such as no image-forming means by lenses can have.  It is literally rectigraphic, rectilinear, it needs no focussing, and it takes a wide angle with equal effect.  Even pinhole snapshots are possible where the light is abundant, with a ten to fifteen second exposure.

“That picture, McLoughlin, was taken yesterday at Hanford’s.  After Miss Ashton left I saw who came out, but this picture shows what happened before.  At a critical moment Miss Ashton stuck a needle in the wall of the studio, counted fifteen, closed the needle-hole, and there is the record.  Walter, Hanford,—­leave us alone an instant.”