Larry puzzled over the paper for several minutes, but was obliged to admit that the more he looked at it the more of a puzzle it became.
“What sort of a cipher is it, anyhow?” he asked. “What is a cipher? I’ve often heard of them, but I never saw one before.”
“A cipher is merely a message from one person to another,” said Mr. Newton. “It is written in such a way as to prevent any third person, in whose hand it may fall, from learning the contents. Each of the persons in the secret has a key to the cipher.
“There are simple ciphers and elaborate ones. There is one used by the United States war and other officials that is very elaborate, and when messages are sent in it, there is a lot of work getting at the real meaning. That is done to prevent enemies learning what the message contains.
“But I do not suppose this cipher is very difficult. The trouble is, it is so simple that it is puzzling. I have tried a number of methods used on fairly hard ciphers, but I can make nothing of it.”
“What in the world do you suppose they wrote in cipher for, anyhow?” asked Larry.
“To try and scare you a bit, I reckon. The more mystery they throw around it the worse they think they have you frightened.”
“How have you tried to solve it?”
“Well, first I went on the supposition that it was a letter cipher. That is, that you must pick out certain letters in each word, and then put them together to make sense. I tried several different methods on this line, but all I get is a lot of words as meaningless as those in the cipher.”
“What are you going to do next?”