I transcribed the letters backwards, but the result upon my piece of paper was the same.
“No,” remarked old Hales, “you haven’t got hold of it yet. I’m sure, however, you are near it. That rhyme gives the key—you mark me.”
“I honestly believe it does if we could only discover the proper arrangement,” I declared in breathless excitement.
“That’s just it,” remarked Reggie, in dismay. “That’s just where the ingenuity of the cipher lies. It’s so very simple, and yet so extraordinarily complicated that the possible combinations run into millions. Think of it!”
“But we have the rhyme which distinctly shows their arrangement:—
”‘King Henry the Eighth was a knave to his queen,
He’d one short of seven and nine or ten—’
“That’s plain enough, and we ought, of course, to have seen it from the first,” I said.
“Well, try the king of one suit, the eight of another, the knave of another—and so on,” Hales suggested, bending with keen interest over the faces of the pigmy cards.
Without loss of time I took his advice, and carefully relaid the cards in the manner he suggested. But again the result was an unintelligible array of letters, puzzling, baffling and disappointing.
I recollected what my expert friend had told me, and my heart sank.