“Oh, it’s a true bill, all right. Amos Gately was a wolf in sheep’s clothing! Miss Raynor will have to know it sooner or later. She really knows it now, but she won’t let herself believe it.”
“What about that paper Zizi took from Sadie Kent?”
“That’s what I’m working on. Meet me this afternoon at the Raynor house, and I may be able to tell you.”
The big, cheerful library at Olive’s house had come to be our general meeting-place of an afternoon. I usually dropped in there about four o’clock, and was pretty sure to find Wise or Rivers or both there. Zizi was a whole vaudeville show herself, and Olive was always cordial and hospitable. Mrs. Vail, too, was a gentle old lady, and I had grown to like her.
So I went, as Wise suggested, and found him poring over the mysterious paper.
Looking at it for the first time, I saw merely a lot of letters, pen-written, and arranged in long rows that ran clear across the sheet.
There were perhaps twenty rows or so, and each row held about thirty letters. They were carefully aligned and evenly spaced, and, without doubt, contained a hidden message.
“I’ve unraveled a lot of cryptograms in my time,” said Wise, “but this isn’t a cryptogram. I mean it isn’t in cipher code,—there’s some other way of getting at it.”
We all studied it. Olive, Zizi, Wise, and I bent our heads over the table where it lay, while Mrs. Vail looked on from a little distance, and babbled about some man she knew once, who could solve secret writings.
Suddenly Zizi jumped up, and running around the table, viewed the paper from the other side.