“What can this be?” Penny thought in amazement. “Nothing, I guess.”
She crumpled the paper and tossed it away. But as it skittered and bounced like a tumble weed down the trail, she suddenly changed her mind and darted after it again. Carefully straightening out the page she examined it a second time.
“This looks like copy paper used in a newspaper office,” she told herself. “But there is no newspaper in Pine Top, I wonder—?”
The conviction came to Penny that the jumbled letters might be in code. Her pulse leaped at the thought. If only she were able to decipher it!
“I’ll take this to the lodge and work on it,” she decided quickly. “Who knows? It may be just the key I need to unlock this strange affair of the Green Door!”
CHAPTER
9
A CALL FOR HELP
All that afternoon and far into the evening Penny devoted to her assigned task, trying to make sense out of the jumbled sentence of typewriting. She used first one method and then another, but she could not decode the brief message. She had moments when she even doubted that it was a code. At last, completely disgusted, she threw down her pencil and put the paper away in a bureau drawer.
“I never was meant to be a cryptographer or whatever you call those brainy fellows who unravel ciphers and things!” she grumbled. “Maybe the trouble with me is that I’m not bright.”
Switching off the lamp, Penny rolled up the shade, and stood for a moment gazing down into the dark valley. Far below she could see lights glowing in the Fergus hotel, mysterious and challenging.
“I feel as if I’m on the verge of an important discovery, yet nothing happens,” she sighed. “Something unusual is going on here, but what?”