"I thought you'd be needin' something else after a while!" he remarked, as he placed the tray on the table. "Make anything out of the nice little note I handed you?"
"Why no. It seems to me simply crazy. There doesn't seem to be any sense to it, not even if one knew all the people and circumstances it referred to. Can you make anything of it?"
"I didn't at first," he replied; "but I just naturally doped it out that there was something shifty about it. So I took it all to pieces, and put it together again, and turned it every which way, and all at once I got on to it. You can just bet it means something, and something pretty slick at that!"
"Oh, tell me. Tell me quickly!" cried Patricia. "How did you find it all out?"
"Well," began Chet, plainly enjoying very much his rôle of Sherlock Holmes, "there was just one word in the thing that made me sit up and take notice. And that word was 'Hanford.' Do you know what Hanford is?"
Patricia shook her head.
"Well, it's a little two-cent hole of a town about ten miles from here. Nothin' special to it at all, just a little, one-horse country town with about thirty houses and a couple of hundred inhabitants. There ain't any reason on this livin' earth why any one should 'see Hanford,' because there ain't nothin' in it to see! So I just shied at that, I did. An' I took Hanford as a startin' point, an' I turned and twisted that note inside out and upside down till, all off a sudden, I struck it! I gotta go now. I got another call to tend to on this floor. But you just take that note and put a pencil mark under every fourth word and copy them out afterward an' see what you get. I'll be back after a while to get this tray. Don't forget—every fourth word!"
When he was gone, Patricia got a pencil and paper and did as he had instructed her. She counted off every fourth word in the letter, underlined it, and feverishly copied down the sequence. The result caused her to drop her pencil and sit staring at the paper, while a shiver of fear ran icily down her spine. The reconstructed letter ran:
Have got it. No need to stay here longer. Go to house in Hanford at once. Meet you there.
F.