From hand to hand the paper passed, and each boy compared it with the dollar. But none was any the wiser when he had finished. Their leader, meantime, sat with his head in his hands, studiously turning the matter over and over in his mind. For a long time he could make nothing of it.
After a while he looked up. "Let me see that paper," he said.
Roy handed him the little disc. Captain Hardy laid the disc beside the dollar on the table, and painstakingly examined again the marks on the coin. After a time he took a sheet of paper and across it in a row wrote down the letters of the alphabet. Then he picked up the message and made check marks below the letters in his alphabet as he found those letters in the message. When he had gone through the message, his paper looked like this:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
/ // / / /// /// / /
/ / / ///
/ / //
/
He picked it up and studied it. "Four T's," he said, "three S's, three A's, and three O's. That ought to give us a clue."
Again he turned to the dollar and began to study it, turning it slowly round, counting the scratches this way and that, making geometric figures of them. Four heads peered over his shoulder as he worked silently with his pencil.
"I can make nothing of it," he said after a time.
Again he sat in deep thought, his fellows meanwhile once more examining dollar and disc and the figures their leader had made on the paper.
"Four T's," repeated Captain Hardy after an interval. "Surely that ought to give us a clue."
Once more he studied the penciled disc. Then he turned to the dollar and again examined its markings. He suddenly exclaimed, "Here are four scratches in a straight row." His eyes began to shine. Slowly he turned the coin. "And here are three in another row, like this," and he indicated the positions of the scratches on the paper disc. "You notice that each row runs from the centre of the coin toward the edge. Let's see if there are any more rows."