Explore "The Cheyne Mystery" by Freeman Wills Crofts on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The discovery that his pockets had been gone through while he was under the influence of the drug reduced Cheyne to a state of even more complete mystification than ever. What had the unknown been looking for? He, Cheyne, had nothing with him that, so far as he could imagine, could possibly have interested any other person. Indeed, money being ruled out, he did not know that he possessed anywhere any paper or small object which it would be worth a stranger's while to steal.
Novels he had read recurred to him in which desperate enterprises were undertaken to obtain some document of importance. Plans of naval or military inventions which would give world supremacy to the power possessing them were perhaps the favorite instruments in these romances, but treaties which would mean war if disclosed to the wrong power, maps of desert islands on which treasure was buried, wills of which the existence was generally unknown and letters compromising the good name of wealthy personages had all been used time and again. But Cheyne had no plans or treaties or compromising letters from which an astute thief might make capital. Think as he would, he could frame no theory to account for Parkes's proceedings.