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Page 91
It must have taken Hargrave half an hour to reach the club. The
first man he saw when he went in was Sir Henry, his hands in the
pockets of his tweed coat and his figure blocking the passage.
"Hello, Hargrave!" he cried. "What have you got in your room
that old Ponsford won't let me go up?"
"Not nine hundred horses!" replied the American.
The Baronet laughed. Then he spoke in a lower voice:
"It's extraordinary lucky that I ran over to the Sorbonne. Come
along up to your room and I'll tell you. This place is filling
up with a lot of thirsty swine. We can't talk in any public room
of it."
They went up the great stairway, lined with paintings of famous
colonials celebrated in the English wars, and into the room.
Hargrave turned on the light and poked up the fire. Sir Henry
sat down by the table. He took out his three newspapers and laid
them down before him.
"My word, Hargrave," he said, "old Arnold is a clever beggar! He
cleared the thing up clean as rain." The Baronet spread the
newspapers out before him.
"We knew here at the Criminal Investigation Department that this
thing was a cipher of some sort, because we knew about these
horses. We had caught up with this business of importing horses.
We knew the shipment was on the way as I explained to you. But
we didn't know the port that it would come into."
"Well," said the American, "did you find out?"
"My word," he cried, "old Arnold laughed in my face. 'Ach,
monsieur,' he cried, mixing up several languages, `it is Heidel's
cipher! It is explained in the seventeenth Criminal Archive at
Gratz. Attend and I will explain it, monsieur. It is always
written in two paragraphs. The first paragraph contains the
secret message, and the second paragraph contains the key to it.
Voila! This message is in two paragraphs:
"'"P.L.A. shipped nine hundred horses on freight steamer Don
Carlos from N. Y.
"'"Have the bill of lading handed over to our agent to check up"
"'The hidden message is made up of certain words and capital
letters contained in the first paragraph, while the presence of
the letter t in the second paragraph indicates the words or
capital letters that count in the first. One has only to note the
numerical position of the letter t in the second paragraph in
order to know what capital letter or word counts in the first
paragraph.'"
The Baronet took out a pencil and underscored the words in the
second paragraph of the printed cipher: "Have the bill of lading
handed over to our agent to check up."
"You will observe that the second, the eighth and the eleventh
words in this paragraph begin with the letter t. Therefore, the
second, the eighth and the eleventh capital letters or words in
the first paragraph make up the hidden message."
And again with his pencil he underscored the letters of the first
paragraph of the cipher: "P.L.A. shipped nine hundred horses on
freight steamer Don Carlos from N. Y."
"So we get L, on, Don."
"London!" cried Hargrave. "The nine-hundred horses are to come
into London!"
And in his excitement he took the gold piece out of his pocket
and pitched it up. He had been stooping over the table. The fog
was creeping into the room. And in the uncertain light about the
ceiling he missed the gold piece and it fell on the table before
Sir Henry. The gold piece did not ring, it fell dull and heavy,
and the big Baronet looked at it openmouthed as though it had
suddenly materialized out of the yellow fog entering the room.
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