AN EXPERT
Returning from morning stables to his barrack-room, Soldier Bill found on his table a document that puzzled him exceedingly. He read it a dozen times, turned it up-side down, smoothed it out with his riding-whip, all in vain. He could make nothing of it; then he summoned Barney.
"When did this thing come, and who brought it?"
"Five minutes back," answered the batman. "Left by a young man on fatigue duty."
So Barney, with military exactitude, described a government official, in the costume of its telegraphic department.
"Did the man leave no message?" continued Bill.
"Said as there was nothing to pay," answered Barney, standing at "attention" and obviously considering this part of his communication satisfactory in the extreme.
"Said there was nothing to pay!" mused his master, "and I would have given him a guinea to explain any two words of it." Then he took his coat off, and sat doggedly down to read the mysterious sentences again and again.
The soldier, as he expressed it, was "up a tree!" That the message must be of importance, he argued from its mode of transmission. The sender's name was legible enough, and his own address perfectly correct. He felt sure Daisy would not have telegraphed from the wilds of Roscommon but on a matter of urgency; and it did seem provoking that the only sense to be got out of the whole composition, was in the sentence with which it concluded—"Do not lose a moment." In his perplexity, he could think of no one so likely to help him as Mrs. Lushington.
"She has more 'nous' in that pretty little head of hers," thought Bill, as he plunged into a suit of plain clothes, "than the Horse Guards and the War Office put together. She'll knock the marrow out of this, if anybody can! I've heard her guess riddles right off, the first time she heard them; and there isn't her equal in London for acting charades and games of that kind, where you must be down to it, before they can say 'knife.' By Jove, I shouldn't wonder if this was a double acrostic after all? Only Daisy wouldn't be such a flat as to telegraph it all the way from Ireland to me. I hope she'll see me. It's awfully early. I wonder if she'll blow me up for coming so soon."