"This was the next question to be decided. I decided it by catching several of the rats in the cell. My jailer was surprised to see me engaged in this work. I examined at least a dozen of them. They were perfectly dry; they had come through the pipe, and, most important of all, they were _not house rats, but field rats_. The other end of the pipe was on land, then, outside the prison walls. So far, so good.
"Then, I knew that if I worked freely from this point I must attract the warden's attention in another direction. You see, by telling the warden that I had come there to escape you made the test more severe, because I had to trick him by false scents."
The warden looked up with a sad expression in his eyes.
"The first thing was to make him think I was trying to communicate with you, Dr. Ransome. So I wrote a note on a piece of linen I tore from my shirt, addressed it to Dr. Ransome, tied a five-dollar bill around it and threw it out the window. I knew the guard would take it to the warden, but I rather hoped the warden would send it as addressed. Have you that first linen note, warden?"
The warden produced the cipher.
"What the deuce does it mean, anyhow?" he asked.
"Read it backward, beginning with the 'T' signature and disregard the division into words," instructed The Thinking Machine.
The warden did so.
"T-h-i-s, this," he spelled, studied it a moment, then read it off, grinning:
"This is not the way I intend to escape."