Weeks that seemed years before Nealman had told me that, after careful study, he had been convinced that there was some truth in the legend of buried treasure. Was it not within the bounds of reason to assume that this cryptic message revealed the hiding place of the treasure? Working on this assumption, I made up an imaginary description of some hiding place, just to see what words occurred with the greatest frequency. I found at once that the word that would be most likely to be used twice in a description of that kind would be some measurement—either feet, yards, meters, rods, or something of the kind. If I could convince myself that “dqbo” represented some English measurement I might find the key and system of the code.
Either “feet,” “yard” or “rods” were words of four letters—either one of which might be represented by “dqbo.” Then I tested each one to see if I could establish a pattern.
I tried first the old code-system of having each letter in the word represent some other letter a certain number of spaces backward or forward in the alphabet. Suppose a man wanted to disguise the word “cab.” He might do so, very easily, by spelling it “dbc”—using, instead of the right letter, the letter immediately following it in the alphabet, “d” for “c,” “b” for “a,” etc. Testing for “feet” as a possible interpretation of “dqbo” I saw that “f” was the second letter in the alphabet beyond the letter “d”—first letter in the script-word—but I found that such a relation could not possibly hold with “e” and “q” respectively, the second letters. “Yard” or “rods” failed the same test. Nor by any juggling of this simple code, counting so many spaces backwards or forwards, could I make it come out true.
Some time before I had decided that it was unlikely to the verge of impossibility that any message could be made up completely of four letter words. It seemed likely, at first, that letters had been cut from each word in order to make them of four letters. Working on this hypothesis I tested for “meters” but the word “dqbo” could not be made to conform.
At that point it was necessary to begin on another tack. I smoked a while in silence, hoping that some idea, some little inspiration that so often furnished the key for such a mystery as this, would come to me. I had a dim thought that, since the words were all of four letters and could not be made intelligible by any shifting of the alphabet, that perhaps it had undergone some double transformation—changed first from words into some other symbol form, and then back into words. But I couldn’t seem to get hold.
If I could only see the key! Possibly it was extremely simple, just before my eyes if I could only grasp it. It wasn’t reasonable, I thought, for a lone man to leave a hidden message without giving some key, however adroit, for the reader to translate it. Jason hadn’t written that message for his own amusement. He had inscribed it to be read by some one who came after—perhaps by himself when old age had dulled his memory.
Working from this point of view I set myself to remember what had been written on the parchment beside the column of figures. Perhaps the key had been there also; I had simply failed to observe it. At the bottom of the message had appeared the words “At F. T.” And at first this seemed to offer the most interesting possibilities.
Certainly the word and letters had some meaning. In the first place this, and the sentence above the script, indicated that the writer did his thinking in English—not in Spanish or Portuguese or any other language. But “F. T.” did not convey any meaning to my mind. I simply couldn’t catch it.
I tried to make the letters “F” and “T” a starting point in the alphabet for rearranging the letters in the column of words, on the same theory that I had worked at first, but nothing came of it. And at that point my hopes and confidence, falling steadily for the past hour, was at its lowest ebb. I didn’t see but that I would have to give up the venture after all.
My mind slipped easily to the message in English above the column—“Sworn by the Book,” or something after that nature. Taking these words simply as they seemed, an oath on the part of the writer that the ensuing message was true, I hadn’t taken the trouble to copy them from the original parchment. Fortunately I remembered them, approximately at least. And I felt a little quickening of hope as I contemplated them.