Busy as he was, he incongruously recalled to his mind how he once used to study the little printed announcements in his hotel rooms, wondering, ruefully, if the delphic text meant that lights and fires were extra, and if baths must be paid for, and vainly trying to discover what his last basket of wood might cost.
Yes, he told himself, he was a hunter out of his domain.

He would always feel intimidated and insecure in this land of aliens and unknowns.

He even sympathetically wondered who it was that had said: "Foreigners are fools!" Then a sudden, irrational, inconsequential sense of gratitude took possession of him, as he felt and heard the woman at work so close beside him.

There was a feeling of companionship about it that made the double risk worth while.
"There's nothing here!" Frank was saying, under her breath.
"Then it _must_ be the box!" he told her.
Durkin knew it was already too late to file and fit a skeleton key.
His first impulse was to bury the box under a muffling pile of bedding and send a bullet or two through the lock.

But his wandering eye caught sight of a Morocco sheath-knife above them on the wall, and a moment later he had the point of it under the steel-bound lid, and as he pried it flew open with a snap.
He waited, listening, and lighting matches, while Frank went through the papers, with nervous and agile fingers, mumbling the inscriptions as she hurriedly read and cast them away from her.
"I thought so!" she said at last, crisply.
The packet held half a dozen blueprints, together with some twelve or fourteen sheets of plans and specifications, on tinted "flimsy." Durkin noticed they were drawn up in red and black ink, and that at the bottom of each document were paragraphs of finely-penned, scholarly-looking writing.