“Seeing what they spell,” she answered. “But ocem, mcoe, oemc or moce doesn’t spell anything in English. Maybe it’s an Indian word and meant danger for Uncle Tod!” she eagerly exclaimed.
“You’re getting as strangely mysterious as Rick,” laughed her father. “Wait a moment, though,” he exclaimed as if a new idea had occurred to him. Quickly he set the letters down on paper, and then he wrote them in a new combination.
“I have it!” he cried, as pleased as a boy or girl would have been over the solution of a puzzle. “This is the word!”
He held out a paper on which he had written:
COME
“That’s what it is,” he said. “It was a summons to Uncle Tod. The word is ‘come,’ and on a bullet means ‘come in a hurry,’ I take it. I think we have solved that much.”
“Huh! Come,” murmured Rick. “I guess that’s it. But say, what a lot of combinations you can make out of four letters!” he cried. He wrote,—meco, ocem, cmoe, moce, eomc, mcoe—until his mother cried:
“Oh, Rick, stop it! You’re getting on my nerves!”
But it is rather surprising to see how many combinations, other than the right one, can be made from those four letters.
“It seems, then,” went on Mr. Dalton, “that Uncle Tod was summoned away by this mysterious message, tossed over the back fence by some one unknown. Why this form of summons should be chosen, rather than an ordinary letter I don’t know. But as long as Uncle Tod has gone, and the letter he left seems to confirm this, we might try to find out how he was able to slip off without any of you seeing him,” and he looked at his wife, daughter and son.