I unlocked a drawer in my old-fashioned bureau, a quaint old piece of Queen Anne furniture from Netherdene, and took out the paper with the cabalistic jumble of figures and letters which I had found on the body of the dead man in Charlton Wood.
For a long while I sat and studied the cipher and its key, finding it very ingeniously contrived—evidently a secret code established for some evil purpose, a code that had been given to the dead man to enable him to have secret communication with some persons who desired to remain unseen and unknown.
My curiosity aroused, my eye chanced to fall upon the morning’s paper and I took it up and turned to the “agony column,” where I saw several cipher advertisements. One of them I endeavoured to read by the aid of the dead man’s key, but was unable. Therefore I tried the second, and afterwards the third. The latter only consisted of two lines of a meaningless jumble of letters and numerals, but taking a pencil I commenced to write down the equivalent of the cipher in plain English.
In a few moments my heart gave a bound.
I had deciphered the first word of the message, namely, “White.”
Very carefully, and after considerable search and calculation, I presently transcribed the secret message thus:—
“White Feather reports W.H. gone home. Nothing to fear.”
That was all. But was it not very significant? The initials were my own, and did not the announcement that I had “gone home” mean that I had gone to my death. There was nothing to fear, it was plainly stated.
They therefore had feared us, and that was the motive of their ingenious crime.
For whose eyes was that curious advertisement intended, I wondered. Who was “White Feather?”