Orme pushed a chair to the window of the sitting-room and smoked lazily, looking out over the beautiful expanse of Lake Michigan, which reflected from its glassy surface the wonderful opalescence of early evening. He seemed to have set forth on a new and adventurous road. How strangely the girl of the car had come into his life!
Then he thought of the five-dollar bill, with the curious inscription. He took it from his pocket-book and examined it by the fading light. The words ran the full length of the face. Orme noticed that the writing had a foreign look. There were flourishes which seemed distinctly un-American.
He turned the bill over. Apparently there was no writing on the back, but as he looked more closely he saw a dark blur in the upper left-hand corner. Even in the dusk he could make out that this was not a spot of dirt; the edges were defined too distinctly for a smudge; and it was not black enough for an ink-blot.
Moving to the center-table, he switched on the electric lamp, and looked at the blur again. It stood out plainly now, a series of letters and numbers:
Evans, S. R. Chi. A. 100 N. 210 E. T.
The first thought that came to Orme was that this could be no hoax. A joker would have made the curious cryptogram more conspicuous. But what did it mean? Was it a secret formula? Did it give the location of a buried treasure? And why in the name of common sense had it been written on a five-dollar bill?
More likely, Orme reasoned, it concealed information for or about some person—“S. R. Evans,” probably. And who was this S. R. Evans?
The better to study the mystery, Orme copied the inscription on a sheet of note-paper, which he found in the table drawer. From the first he decided that there was no cipher. The letters undoubtedly were abbreviations. “Evans” must be, as he had already determined, a man’s name. “Chi” might be, probably was, “Chicago.” “100 N. 210 E.” looked like “100 (feet? paces?) north, 210 (feet? paces?) east.”
The “A.” and the “T.” bothered him. “A.” might be the place to which “S. R. Evans” was directed, or at which he was to be found—a place sufficiently indicated by the letter. Now as to the “T.”—was it “treasure”? Or was it “time”? Or “true”? Orme had no way of telling. It might even be the initial of the person who had penned the instructions.
Without knowing where “A.” was, Orme could make nothing of the cryptogram. For that matter, he realized that unless the secret were criminal it was not his affair. But he knew that legitimate business information is seldom transmitted by such mysterious means.