"Good!" Trenholm's eyes were bright with excitement. Looking again at the first stamp, he noticed that the first, third, and fifth letters of the words "watch" were indicated on the first alphabet, and the remaining letters on the second one. Trenholm held up the envelope to the light again. "See, Miss Ward!" he exclaimed. "The stamp on the extreme right has only four indentations, though the left-hand corner has been cut off." She studied the envelope in silence for a few seconds. "The letters are G and E in the first alphabet," she pointed out. "They must be the odd letters of the word coded, and R and V in the second alphabet, corresponding to the even letters, but I can't make any word out of them." "Suppose we call the cut of the left-hand corner of the stamp an A," suggested Trenholm. "It may be a quick way to mark an indentation when a corner square was involved; though better care was used in the A of the second alphabet in the first stamp examined. What word have you now, Miss Ward?" "Grave." Trenholm stared at her. "Grave," he repeated, then, suppressing comment, went ahead decoding the message. "This center one appears the simplest," he said. "Here the perforations cut are numbers 5, 12, 20, 5, 18, 20--odd letters, E, L, T; even letters, E, R, T. Got them down, Miss Ward?" "They make the word--letter," briefly, not glancing up. "Go ahead." "The next letters are E, I, T, for the odd, and E, H, N, R, for the even." Trenholm laid down his perforation gauge and frowned. "The code seems to fail here," he grumbled. "It has given four even letters and only three odd. The other way around would be all right, but it is impossible to make a word with more even than odd letters." "Let me see the envelope." Miriam put aside her pencil and carefully examined the stamps against the light. "Look, Mr. Trenholm, here are pinholes opposite some of the letters--two opposite the odd T, and one opposite the even H." "Probably they stand for repetitions of the same letters, in which case the letters would be: odd--E, I, T, T, T; even--E, H, H, N, R," declared Trenholm. "But they don't make sense." He paused and looked at the stamps already decoded. "See here, the first letter in each word we have deciphered is on the side of the stamp which faces the left side of the envelope." "Oh, then that accounts for the apparently careless manner in which the stamps are stuck on the envelope," said Miriam. "The only letter on the second stamp, which is indicated by a cut in the way you have just described, is T." "So our next word begins with T." Trenholm took up a pencil and did some figuring on Miriam's pad. "With so many T's and H's to use, suppose we start off with Th," he began, "and the next letter is either E, I, or T. It must be one of the vowels. No, E is no good." Trenholm ran his fingers through his hair until it stood upright. "We'll take I, and here is an R available--by Jove--_thirteenth_!"