“Key letter—x. One-two-three—stroke at four,” muttered the Hawk—and in parallel columns set down the letters of the alphabet, one column transposed.
It took the Hawk much longer to decode the message than it had taken those in the house to perform the same task. The Hawk was working under difficulties. A stone, none too flat, served to rest his paper upon, and he had only two hands with which to manipulate pencil, flashlight and coat. At the expiration of perhaps half an hour the result of his work looked like this:
And then the Hawk looked up—the throb and mutter of a distant train was in the air. Pencil, paper and flashlight were restored to his pockets, and he drew further back from the right of way. Far down the track the way freight's headlight flashed into view. A minute passed, another, and still another. And now, where the Hawk had lain, the ground was ablaze with light—then black again; there was the roar of steam, a grind and clash and shatter ricochetting down the string of cars, the scream and shriek of brake-shoes, and then, a panting thing, as though the big mogul were drawing in deep breaths after great exertion, the way freight came to a standstill a few yards from the siding switch.
The Hawk crept forward, his eyes sweeping down the length of the train in a keen, tense gaze. There was a flat car—it showed in a curious open space, like a break in the black thread stretched along the track—but it was too far away, and too perilously close to the caboose. His eyes travelled back; and, being nearer to the train now he discerned a boxcar, empty, its door open, almost in front of him. He crawled forward until he was abreast of it, and until he lay close up against the rails, looked cautiously up and down the length of the train, sprang to his feet, and in an instant lay stretched out far back in the interior of the car.
The train moved forward, stopped again at the station, and again moved forward. The Hawk reverted to his pencil, paper and flashlight. The code message now read:
seal waxp aper plan tedb ehin dlar gefr amed pict ureo verm ante lmer idan ssit ting room
It was now simply a matter of grouping the letters properly, and the Hawk wrote out the message at the bottom of the sheet: