"You see," said Sir Charles, with a wave of the hand, "she couldn't have hidden in here, neither could she have hidden outside and overheard, for nothing was said that could have been of any use to her."
"Oh, I can answer for that, Mr. Cleek," put in young Grimsdick. "We were so careful upon that point that Sir Charles never dictated even the smallest thing that he wanted recorded; merely passed over the papers and said: 'Copy that where I have marked it'; and to save my table from being overcrowded, I scratched down the marked paragraphs in shorthand, and prepared to transcribe them on the typewriter later. Why, sir, look here; the diabolical part of the mystery is that those two fragments of sentences flashed out at the telegraph office at the time of that frightful peal of thunder, and at that very instant I was in the act of transcribing them on the typewriter."
"Hello! Hello!" rapped out Cleek, twitching round sharply. "Sure of that, are you--absolutely sure?"
"Beyond all question, Mr. Cleek. Sir Charles will tell you that the thunder-clap was so violent and so sudden that both he and Mr. MacInery fairly jumped. As for me, I was so startled that I struck a wrong letter by mistake and had to rub out a word and type it over again. Come and see. The paper is still on my table, and I can show you the erasure and the alteration. Now, nobody could have seen that paper, at that particular time; not a solitary word had been spoken with regard to it, and it wasn't more than half a minute before that Sir Charles himself had taken it out of the safe. Look, sir, here's the paper and here's the place where I erased the word--see?"
Cleek walked over to the typewriter and looked at the paper, saw the erasure, lifted it, looked at other typed sheets lying under it, and then knotted up his brows.
"H'm!" he said reflectively, and looked farther. "You've got a devilish hard touch for a man who does this sort of thing constantly, and ought therefore to be an adept in the art of typewriting evenly. And there are other errors and erasures. Look here, my friend, I don't believe you're used to this machine."
"No, sir, I'm not. I'm not accustomed to a shift key. My own machine hasn't one."