Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/168

142 And, whereas any person with normal 'attention' can write correctly from one to thirty while counting aloud from one to fifty, Gordon was incapable of keeping correctly to his set of figures under my very slight distraction.

"I assured myself thus that he was incapable of correctly counting money under the distraction and excitement such as was about him the morning of the 'run'; and I felt it probable that the missing money was never put into the bag, and must either have been lost in the bank or taken by some one else. As I set myself, then, to puzzling out the mystery of the scraps which I took from Gordon, I soon saw that the writing '42$=80' and '35=8?$,' which seemed perfectly senseless equations, might not be equations at all, but secret writing instead, made up of six symbols each, the number of letters in your combination. Besides the numbers, the other three symbols were common ones in commercial correspondence. Then, the attack on old Gordon's typewriter desk. You told me he had been a stenographer; and—it flashed to me.

"He had not dared to write the combination in plain letters; so he had hit on a very simple, but also very ingenious, cipher. He wrote the word, not in letters, but in the figures and symbols which accompanied each letter on the keyboard of his old typewriting machine. The cipher explained why the other man was after the old combination in the waste-basket, hoping to get enough words together so he could figure them out, as he had been doing on the scraps of paper which Gordon found. Till then Gordon might have