“the meaning of the thing was so very plain,” hewitt said to me afterwards, “that the duffers who had the ‘flitterbat lancers’ in hand for so long never saw it at all. if shiels had made an ordinary clumsy cryptogram, all letters and figures, they would have seen what it was at once, and at least would have tried to read it; but because it was put in the form of music, they tried everything else but the right way. it was a clever dodge of shiels’s, without a doubt. very few people, police officers or not, turning over a heap of old music, would notice or feel suspicious of that little slip among the rest. but once one sees it is a cryptogram (and the absence of bar-lines and of notes beyond the stave would suggest that) the reading is as easy as possible. for my part i tried it as a cryptogram at once. you know the plan—it has been described a hundred times. see here—look at this copy of the ‘flitterbat lancers.’ its only difficulty—and that is a small one—is that the words are not divided. since there are on the stave positions for less than a dozen notes, and there are twenty-six letters to be indicated, it follows that crotchets, quavers, and semiquavers on the same line or space must mean different letters. the first step is obvious. we count the notes to ascertain which sign occurs most frequently, and we find that the crotchet in the top space is the sign required—it occurs no less than eleven times. now the letter most frequently occurring in an ordinary sentence of english is e. let us then suppose that this represents e. at once a coincidence strikes us. in ordinary musical notation in the treble clef the note occupying the top space would be e. let us remember that presently. now the most common word in the english language is the. we know the sign for e, the last letter of this word, so let us see if in more than one place that sign is preceded by two others identical in each case. if so, the probability is that the other two signs will represent t and h, and the whole word will be the. now it happens in no less than four places the sign e is preceded by the same two other signs—once in the first line, twice in the second, and once in the fourth. no word of three letters ending in e would be in the least likely to occur four times in a short sentence except the. then we will call it the, and note the signs preceding the e. they are a quaver under the bottom line for the t, and a crotchet on the first space for the h. we travel along the stave, and wherever these signs occur we mark them with t or h, as the case may be. but now we remember that e, the crotchet in the top space, is in its right place as a musical note, while the crotchet in the bottom space means h, which is no musical note at all. considering this for a minute, we remember that among the notes which are expressed in ordinary music on the treble stave, without the use of ledger lines, d e and f are repeated at the lower and at the upper part of the stave. therefore, anybody making a cryptogram of musical notes would probably use one set of these duplicate positions to indicate other letters, and as h is in the lower part of the stave, that is where the variation comes in. let us experiment by assuming that all the crotchets above f in ordinary musical notation have their usual values, and let us set the letters over their respective notes. now things begin to shape. look toward the end of the second line: there is the word the and the letters f f t h, with another note between the two fs. now that word can only possibly be fifth, so that now we have the sign for i. it is the crotchet on the bottom line. let us go through and mark the is. and now observe. the first sign of the lot is i, and there is one other sign before the word the. the only words possible here beginning with i, and of two letters, are it, if, is and in. now we have the signs for t and f, so we know that it isn’t it or if. is would be unlikely here, because there is a tendency, as you see, to regularity in these signs, and t, the next letter alphabetically to s, is at the bottom of the stave. let us try n. at once we get the word dance at the beginning of line three. and now we have got enough to see the system of the thing. make a stave and put g a b c and the higher d e f in their proper musical places. then fill in the blank places with the next letters of the alphabet downward, h i j, and we find that h and i fall in the places we have already discovered for them as crotchets. now take quavers, and go on with k l m n o, and so on as before, beginning on the a space. when you have filled the quavers, do the same with semiquavers—there are only six alphabetical letters left for this—u v w x y z. now you will find that this exactly agrees with all we have ascertained already, and if you will use the other letters to fill up over the signs still unmarked you will get the whole message:—
“‘in the colt row ken over the coals the fifth dancer slides says jerry shiels the horney.’
1-07
“the fifth dancer slides.”
“‘dancer,’ as perhaps you didn’t know, is thieves’ slang for a stair, and ‘horney’ is the strolling musician’s name for a cornet player. of course the thing took a little time to work out, chiefly because the sentence was short, and gave one few opportunities. but anybody with the key, using the cipher as a means of communication, would read it as easily as print. snape used the same cipher in his jocular little note to the next searcher in the colt row staircase.
“as soon as i had read it, of course i guessed the purport of the ‘flitterbat lancers.’ jerry shiels’s name is well-known to anybody with half my knowledge of the criminal records of the century, and his connection with the missing wedlake jewels, and his death in prison, came to my mind at once. (the police afterwards, by the way, soon identified his old house in colt row from their records.) certainly here was something hidden, and as the wedlake jewels seemed most likely, i made the shot in talking to hoker.”
“but you terribly astonished him by telling him his name and address. how was that?”
hewitt laughed aloud. “that,” he said; “why, that was the thinnest trick of all. why, the man had it engraved at large all over the silver band of his umbrella handle. when he left his umbrella outside, kerrett (i had indicated the umbrella to him by a sign) just copied the lettering on one of the ordinary visitors’ forms, and brought it in. you will remember i treated it as an ordinary visitor’s announcement. kerrett has played that trick before, i fear.” and he laughed again.
on the afternoon of the next day reuben b. hoker called on hewitt and had half an hour’s talk with him in his private room. after that he came up to me with half a crown in his hand. “sir,” he said, “everything has turned out a durned sell. i don’t want to talk about it any more. i’m goin’ out o’ this durn country. night before last i broke your winder. you put the damage at half a crown. here is the money. good-day to you, sir.”
and reuben b. hoker went out into the tumultuous world.
