“I tell you what,” said Mr. Newton, “suppose you come over to my house this evening, and we’ll tackle the cipher. It may be important for us to solve it as soon as possible.” “I’ll come,” said Larry. Mr. Newton lived in a sort of bachelor hotel. He had several rooms, and when Larry called that evening, he found his friend seated at a large table, on which were spread out a number of sheets of paper, several pencils, and some books. In the center of the table was the cipher letter Larry had received, which he had given Mr. Newton that afternoon. “Are you making any headway?” asked Larry. “Not very much,” confessed Mr. Newton. “I have been studying the thing, trying to see where to start. Take a look at it yourself, and see if it suggests anything to you. Two heads are better than one, any day.” Larry puzzled over the paper for several minutes, but was obliged to admit that the more he looked at it the more of a puzzle it became. “What sort of a cipher is it, anyhow?” he asked. “What is a cipher? I’ve often heard of them, but I never saw one before.” “A cipher is merely a message from one person to another,” said Mr. Newton. “It is written in such a way as to prevent any third person, in whose hand it may fall, from learning the contents. Each of the persons in the secret has a key to the cipher. “There are simple ciphers and elaborate ones. There is one used by the United States war and other officials that is very elaborate, and when messages are sent in it, there is a lot of work getting at the real meaning. That is done to prevent enemies learning what the message contains. “But I do not suppose this cipher is very difficult. The trouble is, it is so simple that it is puzzling. I have tried a number of methods used on fairly hard ciphers, but I can make nothing of it.” “What in the world do you suppose they wrote in cipher for, anyhow?” asked Larry. “To try and scare you a bit, I reckon. The more mystery they throw around it the worse they think they have you frightened.” “How have you tried to solve it?” “Well, first I went on the supposition that it was a letter cipher. That is, that you must pick out certain letters in each word, and then put them together to make sense. I tried several different methods on this line, but all I get is a lot of words as meaningless as those in the cipher.” “What are you going to do next?” “I’m going to take out all the words that seem to have any bearing on our matters. I’ll set them down, and try to make sense of them.” Accordingly, with Larry to help, Mr. Newton wrote down the following: blue, marks, ink, farm, door, and deed.