"What an ass I am!" said Jack. "It never struck me that Palafox's Christian name might be included. But what then? The only ciphering I ever did was in money sums, and weights and measures. How do you work out the thing now?"
"Why, it's clear that my father's message is made up of the words JOSÉ PALAFOX, which have only nine different letters. It's not likely that the message contains only nine letters; therefore one letter of the cipher probably stands for several, and I shouldn't wonder if all the letters of the alphabet were represented by those nine. Suppose we put down the letters of the alphabet and the other letters underneath, and see what can be made of it then."
"We don't know what language it is in."
"Probably Spanish, like the letter itself. Let us try."
She wrote down the twenty-seven letters of the Spanish alphabet, and under each the corresponding letter of the key words:—
a b c ch d e f g h i j l ll m n ñ o p q r s t u v x y z
J O S E P A L A F O X J O S E P A L A F O X J O S E P
"There you are, Jack. Now look. The first letter of the cipher, s, may stand for either c or m or x; we can't tell which of the three until we get a little further."
"It's a pretty puzzle," said Jack. "The next letter is E; that may be either ch or n or y, and if we put either of them after c, m, or x, we sha'n't begin to make any Spanish word that I know of."
"No," agreed Juanita, putting her pencil to her lips. "It looks as if the sentence can't be Spanish."
"Don Fernan wrote to me in English. Let us try that. I'll do it this time."