“I’d give my shirt to know what that message means,” remarked Biff. “I’ll bet it is something mighty important.”
“He wouldn’t have put it in cipher if it wasn’t important,” Frank agreed. “Well, this is certainly pretty deep. I wonder if Sparewell really was the man who came here and hid our supplies. The more I think of it, the more it seems to me that he did come here. There’s absolutely nothing in this book to connect it with Hanleigh. His name isn’t mentioned from beginning to end.” Frank had flipped over the rest of the pages and found that they were blank.
“Why should Sparewell pop up here at this time?” pondered Joe. “Do you think he and Hanleigh may be working together?”
“Perhaps. And still, if Sparewell is still alive, I can’t see why this notebook ends where it does. Eleven years have passed since he made these entries.”
“He may have kept other notebooks,” Joe suggested. “Perhaps he merely kept this one because of the cipher. There was some secret he didn’t want others to know, and he kept that notebook in his possession at all times, for fear some one might find it and solve the cipher.”
“That sounds reasonable. But I’m afraid we can’t do much more unless we can learn the secret of that message.”
“It’s a tough one,” Chet commented.
“Ciphers have been solved before this. Have you ever read Edgar Allan Poe’s story called ‘The Gold Bug?’ In that yarn, he had a cipher to solve and he went on the idea that the letter ‘e’ was the letter most frequently used in the English language,” said Frank. “Suppose we apply it to this case. Looking it over, the letter most often used in the cipher is the letter ‘m.’ If we take ‘m’ to mean ‘e’——”
“You’ve got it!” shouted Chet. “I’ll bet we’ll solve this riddle yet.”
Frank marked down the letter “e” above each place in the cipher where the letter “m” occurred. But he was no farther ahead than he was before. Presuming that “m” should really be “e” he found that it occurred once in the first word—for he took it for granted that each dot in the message represented a division between two words—once in the second word, once in the third, once in the fifth and twice in the sixth. This simply rendered the cipher more confusing than ever, for there was no clue as to what the other letters might be.