Then they moved and met mine, and they seemed to give me my marching orders.
'Sir Walter,' I said, 'three years ago you and I sat in this very room.
We thought we were done to the world, as we think now.

We had just that one miserable little clue to hang on to--a dozen words scribbled in a notebook by a dead man.

You thought I was mad when I asked for Scudder's book, but we put our backs into the job and in twenty-four hours we had won out.

Remember that then we were fighting against time.
Now we have a reasonable amount of leisure.

Then we had nothing but a sentence of gibberish.