“Not so badly for a stupid person,” Lenora replied.  “I’m not nearly so quick as Laura, of course, but I could make a message out if I took time over it.”

Laura, who had been busy with some papers at the further end of the room, came over and joined them.

“Say, it’s a dandy little affair, that, Mr. Quest,” she exclaimed.  “I had a try with it, a day or so ago.  Jim spoke to me from Fifth Avenue.”

“We’ve got it tuned to a shade now,” Quest declared.  “Equipped with this simple little device, you can speak to me from anywhere up to ten or a dozen miles.  What are you working on this morning, Laura?”

“Same old stunt,” the girl replied.  “I have been reading up the records of the savants of New York.  From what I can make out about them, it doesn’t seem to me that there’s one amongst the whole bunch likely to have pluck enough to tamper with the Professor’s skeleton.”

Quest frowned a little gloomily.  He rose to his feet and moved restlessly about the room.

“Say, girls,” he confessed, “this is the first time in my life I have been in a fix like this.  Two cases on hand and nothing doing with either of them.  Criminologist, indeed!  I guess I’d better go over to England and take a job at Scotland Yard.  That’s about what I’m fit for.  Whose box is this?”

Quest had paused suddenly in front of an oak sideboard which stood against the wall.  Occupying a position upon it of some prominence was a small black box, whose presence there seemed to him unfamiliar.  Laura came over to his side and looked at it also in puzzled fashion.

“Never saw it before in my life,” she answered.  “Say, kid, is this yours?” she added, turning to Lenora.

Lenora shook her head.  She, too, examined it a little wonderingly.

“It wasn’t there a short time ago.  I brought a duster and went over the sideboard myself.”

Quest grunted.

“H’m!  No one else has been in the room, and it hasn’t been empty for more than ten minutes,” he remarked.  “Well, let’s see what’s inside, any way.”

“Just be careful, Mr. Quest,” Laura advised.  “I don’t get that box at all.”

Quest pushed it with his forefinger.

“No bomb inside, any way,” he remarked.  “Here goes!”

He lifted off the lid.  There was nothing in the interior but a sheet of paper folded up.  Quest smoothed it out with his hand.  They all leaned over and read the following words, written in an obviously disguised hand: 

“You have embarked on a new study—­anthropology.  What characteristic strikes you most forcibly in connection with it?  Cunning?  The necklace might be where the skeleton is.  Why not begin at the beginning?”

The note was unsigned, but in the spot where a signature might have been there was a rough pen drawing of two hands, with fingers extended, talon fashion, menacingly, as though poised to strike at some unseen enemy.  Quest, after their first moment of stupefaction, whistled softly.