Page:The Surakarta (1913).djvu/149

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MR. McADAMS CONVERSES
133

—except Miss Regan and Baraka—have seen at once that it could not be opened by anyone who had received no instruction beyond watching it opened once by someone else, which was all Hereford had done."

"I will admit that," Du Brock agreed, "provided there had been no previous opportunity for preparation. Otherwise I would prefer not to forget that we are dealing in this case with a highly educated and able man brought in contact with a mechanism, complicated enough no doubt, but devised in an age of slower and less definite thinking. There are, if newspaper accounts have stated it right, some millions of different ways in which the levers of the box can be manipulated; at the same time, there are—again if the newspaper reports are correct—only four figures each with a head and two