“How the devil should I know?”
“Ninety-nine, Mr. Priam.”
Priam glanced at Keats. But Keats was merely smoking with the gusto of a man who has denied himself too long, and there was nothing on Ellery’s face but concern. “So it’s got ninety-nine words. I don’t get it.”
“Ninety-nine words, Mr. Priam, comprising three hundred and ninety-seven letters of the English alphabet.”
“I still don’t get it.” A note of truculence crept into Priam’s heavy voice. “What are you trying to prove, that you can count?”
“I’m trying to prove ― and I can prove, Mr. Priam ― that there’s something wrong with this message.”
“Wrong?” Priam’s beard shot up. “What?”
“The tools of my business, Mr. Priam,” said Ellery, “are words. I not only write words of my own, but I read extensively ― and sometimes with envy ― the words of others. So I consider myself qualified to make the following observation: This is the first time I’ve ever run across a piece of English prose, deathless or otherwise, made up of as many as ninety-nine words, consisting of almost four hundred individual characters, in which the writer jailed to use a single letter T.”
“Single letter T” repeated Priam. His lips moved after he stopped speaking, so that for a moment it looked as if he were chewing something with a foreign and disagreeable taste.
“It took me a long time to spot that, Mr. Priam,” continued Ellery, walking around the body of Alfred Wallace. “It’s the sort of thing you can’t see because it’s so obvious. When we read, most of us concentrate on the sense of what we’re reading, not its physical structure. Who looks at a building and sees the individual bricks? Yet the secret of the building lies precisely there. There are twenty-six basic bricks in the English language, some of them more important than the rest. There’s no guesswork about those bricks, Mr. Priam. Their nature, their usability, their interrelation-ships, the frequency of their occurrence have been determined as scientifically as the composition of stucco.