“Isn’t it possible,” suggested Herb, “that he’s employed as radio operator in the prison? He understands sending and receiving all right.”
“That doesn’t strike me hard either,” Bob objected. “Likely enough the prison is equipped with a wireless set, but it isn’t probable that they’d let a prisoner operate it. It would give him too good a chance to get in touch with confederates outside the jail. Then, too, his stuttering would make him a laughing stock.
“The only explanation that I can see,” he went on, “is that he’s escaped, and he’s sending this message on his own hook. Though what the message is about is beyond me.”
“Just what did you get down?” asked Jimmy curiously. “I caught a few words, but I don’t remember them all.”
“It’s a regular hodgepodge,” replied Bob, spreading out the sheet of paper, while they all crowded around to read.
“Corn—hay—six—paint—water—slow—sick—jelly,” read Joe aloud. “Sounds to me like the ravings of a delirium patient.”
“And yet I’m sure that I got all the words down right,” said Bob perplexedly. “It must be a code of some kind. We can’t understand it, and Cassey didn’t mean that any one should except some one person whose ear was glued to a radiophone. But you can bet that that person understood it all right.”
“I wonder if we couldn’t make it out,” suggested Herb.
“No harm in trying,” said Joe, “though compared to this a Chinese puzzle is as simple as A B C. Let’s take a hack at it, anyhow. We’ll each take a separate sheet of paper and try to get something out of it that makes sense.”
For nearly an hour the boys did their best. They put the words in different orders, read them forward and backward. But the ideas conveyed by the separate words were so utterly dissimilar that they could frame nothing that had the slightest glimmering of sense and they were finally compelled to give it up.