Page:O'Higgins--The Adventures of Detective Barney.djvu/37

 The names are easy. But that ’s as far as we can get.”

They stood together beside the table, their feet in a patch of sunlight, their backs to Barney, interested in a page of the report which Babbing was showing to his operative. “ ‘Kacaderm,’ for instance. That ’s ‘Murdock.’ He ’s one of the men they ’ve been bleeding, out there. They take the consonants ‘m-r-d-c-k,’ reverse them ‘k-c-d-r-m,’ and fill in vowels. But they do that only with the proper names. For instance, this last one: ‘Thunder command wind kacaderm.’ That can’t be solved by reversing consonants.”

The operative studied the page. “Search me,” he said. “Has Acker worked on it?”

“Yes. It was he that puzzled out the names. It ’s not a cryptogram. They have some simple method of writing one whole word for another. There ’s no use wasting time on it. We ’ll have to make our plant to catch him writing a message.”

“I see.”