We worked each other to our feet and my uncle Otto found a flashlight.

He howled his anguish. “Fused. Fused. My machine in ruins is. It has to destruction devoted been.”

“But the signatures?” I yelled at him. “Did you get them?”

He stopped in mid-cry. “I haven’t looked.”

He looked, and I closed my eyes. The disappearance of a hundred thousand dollars is not an easy thing to watch.

He cried, “Ah, ha!” and I opened my eyes quickly. He had a square of parchment in his hand some two inches on a side. It had three signatures on it and the top one was that of Rutton Gwinnett.

Now, mind you, the signature was absolutely genuine. It was no fake. There wasn’t an atom of fraud about the whole transaction. I want that understood. Lying on my uncle Otto’s broad hand was a signature indited with the Georgian hand of Rutton Gwinnett himself on the authentic parchment of the honest-to-God, real-life Declaration of Independence.

It was decided that my uncle Otto would travel down to Washington with the parchment scrap. I was unsatisfactory for the purpose. I was a lawyer. I would be expected to know too much. He was merely a scientific genius, and wasn’t expected to know anything. Besides, who could suspect Dr. Otto Schlemmelmayer of anything but the most transparent honesty.

We spent a week arranging our story. I bought a book for the occasion, an old history of colonial Georgia, in a secondhand shop. My uncle Otto was to take it with him and claim that he had found a document among its leaves; a letter to the Continental Congress in the name of the state of Georgia. He shrugged his shoulders at it and held it out over a Bunsen flame. Why should a physicist be interested in letters? Then he became aware of the peculiar odor it gave off as it burned and the slowness with which it was consumed. He beat out the flames but saved only the piece with the signatures. He looked at it and the name Button Gwinnett had stirred a slight fiber of memory.