The Sleuth of St. James's Square by Melville Davisson Post (black authors fiction txt) 📕

horses!” replied the American.

The Baronet laughed. Then he spoke in a lower voice:

“It's extraordinary lucky that I ran over to the Sorbonne. Come along up to your room and I'll tell you. This place is filling up with a lot of thirsty swine. We can't talk in any public room of it.”

They went up the great stairway, lined with paintings of famous colonials celebrated in the English wars, and into the room. Hargrave turned on the light and poked up the fire. Sir Henry sat down by the table. He took out his three newspapers and laid them down before him.

“My word, Hargrave,” he said, “old Arnold is a clever beggar! He cleared the thing up clean as rain.” The Baronet spread the newspapers out before him.

“We knew here at the Criminal Investigation Department that this thing was a cipher of some sort, because we knew about these horses. We had caught up with this business of importing horses. We knew the shipment was on the way as I explained to you. But we didn't know the port that it would come into.”

“Well,” said the American, “did you find out?”

“My word,” he cried, “old Arnold laughed in my face. 'Ach, monsieur,' he cried, mixing up several languages, 'it is Heidel's cipher! It is explained in the seventeenth Criminal Archive at Gratz. Attend and I will explain it, monsieur. It is always written in two paragraphs. The first paragraph contains the secret message, and the second paragraph contains the key to it. Voila! This message is in two paragraphs:

“'"P.L.A. shipped nine hundred horses on freight steamer Don Carlos from N. Y.

“'"Have the bill of lading handed over to our agent to check up.”

“'The hidden message is made up of certain words and capital letters contained in the first paragraph, while the presence of the letter t in the second paragraph indicates the words or capital letters that count in the first. One has only to note the numerical position of the letter t in the second paragraph in order to know what capital letter or word counts in the first paragraph.'”

The Baronet took out a pencil and underscored the words in the second paragraph of the printed cipher: “Have the bill of lading handed over to our agent to check up.”

“You will observe that the second, the eighth and the eleventh words in this paragraph begin with the letter t. Therefore, the second, the eighth and the eleventh capital letters or words in the first paragraph make up the hidden message.”

And again with his pencil he underscored the letters of the first paragraph of the cipher: “P.L.A. shipped nine hundred horses on freight steamer Don Carlos from N. Y.”

“So we get L, on, Don.”

“London!” cried Hargrave. “The nine-hundred horses are to come into London!”

And in his excitement he took the gold piece out of his pocket and pitched it up. He had been stooping over the table. The fog was creeping into the room. And in the uncertain light about the ceiling he missed the gold piece and it fell on the table before Sir Henry. The gold piece did not ring, it fell dull and heavy, and the big Baronet looked at it openmouthed as though it had suddenly materialized out of the yellow fog entering the room.

“My word!” he cried. “One of the nine hundred horses!”

Hargrave stopped motionless like a man stricken by some sorcery.

“One of the nine hundred horses!” he echoed.

The Baronet was digging at the gold piece with the blade of his knife.

“Precisely! In the criminal argot a counterfeit American twenty-dollar gold piece is called a 'horse.'

“Look,” he said, and he dug into the coin with his knife, “it's white inside, made of Babbit metal, milled with a file and gold-plated. Where did you get it?”

The American stammered.

“Where could I have gotten it?” he murmured.

“Well,” the Baronet said, “you might have got it from a big, old, pasty-faced Alsatian; that would be 'Dago' Mulehaus. Or you might have got it from an energetic, middle-aged, American woman posing as a social leader in the States; that would be 'Hustling' Anne; both bad crooks, at the head of an international gang of counterfeiters.”