“I’m going to take out all the words that seem to have any bearing on our matters. I’ll set them down, and try to make sense of them.”
Accordingly, with Larry to help, Mr. Newton wrote down the following: blue, marks, ink, farm, door, and deed.
“Those are all that I see that concern us directly,” he said. “There is ‘blue,’ for the blue-handed man; ‘marks,’ which he had on his hand; ‘ink,’ which might refer to Mr. Hosfer’s attempts; ‘farm,’ which certainly refers to you; ‘door,’ which is what had the blue mark on it when I went into Chinatown; and ‘deed,’ which is what we’re after. Now we’ll see if I can get anything out of them.”
Mr. Newton tried by combining various letters in each word to get a meaning from the cipher. It was of no avail. Then he started on still another method.
This was to string all the words together so they formed a meaningless jumble of letters.
“Now we’ll go along and take every second letter regardless of the words they are in,” he said.
He did this, and after making several selections, he had this as a result:
OMOSBEHSDENSBYOEEW.
“That’s no go,” he announced, after staring at the combination. “That would never make sense. I’ll try every third letter.”
This time he got: