always interested me, and I did a bit at it myself once as intelligence officer

at Delagoa Bay during the Boer War. I have a head for things like chess and

puzzles, and I used to reckon myself pretty good at finding out cyphers. This

one looked like the numerical kind where sets of figures correspond to the

letters of the alphabet, but any fairly shrewd man can find the clue to that

sort after an hour or two’s work, and I didn’t think Scudder would have been

content with anything so easy. So I fastened on the printed words, for you can

make a pretty good numerical cypher if you have a key word which gives you the

sequence of the letters.

 

I tried for hours, but none of the words answered. Then I fell asleep and woke

at Dumfries just in time to bundle out and get into the slow Galloway train.

There was a man on the platform whose looks I didn’t like, but he never glanced

at me, and when I caught sight of myself in the mirror of an automatic machine I

didn’t wonder. With my brown face, my old tweeds, and my slouch, I was the very

model of one of the hill farmers who were crowding into the third-class

carriages.

 

I travelled with half a dozen in an atmosphere of shag and clay pipes.

 

They had come from the weekly market, and their mouths were full of prices. I

heard accounts of how the lambing had gone up the Cairn and the Deuch and a

dozen other mysterious waters. Above half the men had lunched heavily and were

highly flavoured with whisky, so they took no notice of me. We rumbled slowly

into a land of little wooded glens and then to a great wide moorland place,