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Page 85
"Why should it be printed in English in these foreign papers," he
said, "if it were not a cipher?"
"Perhaps," said Hargrave, "the person for whom it's intended does
not know any other language."
The Baronet shrugged his shoulders.
"The persons for whom this message is intended," he said, "do not
confine themselves to a single language. It's a pretty
well-organized international concern."
"Well," said Hargrave, "it doesn't look like a mystery that ought
to puzzle the ingenuity of the Chief of the Criminal
Investigation Department of the metropolitan police." He nodded
to Sir Henry. "You have only to look out for the arrival of nine
hundred horses and when they get in to see who takes them off the
boat. The thing looks easy."
"It's not so easy as it looks," replied the Baronet. "Evidently
these horses might go to France, Holland or England. That's the
secret in this message. That's where the cipher comes in. The
name of the port is in that cipher somewhere."
"But you can, watch the steamer," said Hargrave, "the Don
Carlos."
The Baronet laughed.
"There's no such steamer!" He got up and began to walk round the
table. "Nine hundred horses," he said. "This thing has got to
stop. They're on the sea now, on the way over from America: We
have got to find out where they will go ashore."
He stopped, stooped over and studied the message which he had
written out and which also lay before him in the three
newspapers.
"It's there," he said, "the name of the port of arrival,
somewhere in those two sentences. But I can't get at it. It's
no cipher that I have ever heard of. It's no one of the hundred
figure or number ciphers that the experts in the department know
anything about. If we knew the port of arrival we could pick up
the clever gentleman who comes to take away the horses. But
what's the port - English, French or Dutch? There are a score of
ports." He struck the paper with his hand. "It's there, my word
for it, if we could only decode the thing."
Then he stood up, his face lifted, his fingers linked behind his
back. He crossed the room and stood looking out at the thin
yellow fog drifting over Piccadilly Circus. Finally he came
back, gathered up his papers and put them in the pocket of his
big tweed coat.
"There's one man in Europe," he said, "who can read this thing.
That's the Swiss expert criminologist, old Arnold, of Zurich.
He's lecturing at the Sorbonne in Paris. I'm going to see him."
Then he went out.
Now that, as has been said, is how the thing began. It was the
first episode in the series of events that began to go forward on
this extraordinary night. One will say that the purchasing agent
for a great New York jewel house ought to be accustomed to
adventures. The writers of romance have stimulated that fancy.
But the fact is that such persons are practical people. They
never do any of the things that the story writers tell us. They
never carry jewels about with them. Of course they know the
police departments of foreign cities. All jewel dealers make a
point of that. Hargrave's father was an old friend of Sir Henry
Marquis, chief of the C. I. D., and the young man always went to
see him when he happened in London. That explains the freedom of
his talk to Hargrave on this night in the Empire Club in
Piccadilly.
The young man went over and sat down by the fire. The big room
was empty. The sounds outside seemed muffled and distant. The
incident that had just passed impressed him. He wondered why
people should imagine that a purchasing agent of a jewel house
must be a sort of expert in the devices of mystery. As has been
said, the thing's a notion. Everything is shipped through
reliable transportation companies and insured. There was much
more mystery in a shipload of horses - the nine hundred horses
that were galloping through the head of Sir Henry Marquis - than
in all the five prosaic years during which young Hargrave had
succeeded his father as a jewel buyer. The American was
impressed by this mystery of the nine hundred horses. Sir Henry
had said it was a mystery in every direction.
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