“Those are all that I see that concern us directly,” he said. “There is ‘blue,’ for the blue-handed man; ‘marks,’ which he had on his hand; ‘ink,’ which might refer to Mr. Hosfer’s attempts; ‘farm,’ which certainly refers to you; ‘door,’ which is what had the blue mark on it when I went into Chinatown; and ‘deed,’ which is what we’re after. Now we’ll see if I can get anything out of them.” Mr. Newton tried by combining various letters in each word to get a meaning from the cipher. It was of no avail. Then he started on still another method. This was to string all the words together so they formed a meaningless jumble of letters. “Now we’ll go along and take every second letter regardless of the words they are in,” he said. He did this, and after making several selections, he had this as a result: OMOSBEHSDENSBYOEEW. “That’s no go,” he announced, after staring at the combination. “That would never make sense. I’ll try every third letter.” This time he got: IOIEEDNSOO. “Stuck again,” he commented. “Too many vowels to get any words that would mean anything out of that.” However, he was not discouraged. He tried the same plan, using respectively the fourth to the tenth letter in the conglomeration. But each time he had to admit defeat. “It gets me,” said Mr. Newton, at length. “If I could only stumble on one or two words I think I could find out the system. The rest would be easy.” “Have you tried taking every seventh word?” asked Larry. “We boys in the country used to consider seven a lucky number.” “We’ll try it, just for luck, then,” spoke Mr. Newton. He quickly set down every seventh word, and had this result when he had gone a little way: WHO DELIVERY WE FURNACE UP COWS THE AUTOMOBILE. “That’s odd,” commented Mr. Newton. “We can make a sentence of that anyhow. Listen: ‘We, the furnace who deliver up automobile cows,’ though it doesn’t make any sense.” “Try some other way of taking the words,” went on Larry. “Maybe we’d better begin at the end, and work up.” “Well, we’ll try your plan for a change,” agreed Mr. Newton. “Take every seventh word from the end. This is what we get: ‘Sign be dog name teapot of evidently,’ and so on. Not much to that.” Then, in very weariness he and Larry sat staring at the paper which they felt sure contained a hidden message for them. “Let’s give it up,” suggested Larry. “If they want to send us any word let them do it in the right way.” “No, I’m not going to give up so easily,” said Mr. Newton. “I’ll have another try at it. Hand the cipher over.” Larry, who had been scanning the mysterious paper, passed it across the table to Mr. Newton. To do so he had to move it in front of a drop gas lamp. As the paper came between Mr. Newton’s eyes and the light the reporter gave a sudden cry. He fairly grabbed the paper from Larry, and looked at it closely. He seemed somewhat disappointed. Then he held it up to the light again. “Did you put those marks on this?” he asked of Larry. “No, what marks?”