disease, I said. This act was due entirely to my friendship for him.
“I examined the body and found a trace of prussic acid on Pomeroy’s tongue. Beside the chair on which he sat a bottle of prussic acid had been broken. I made no autopsy, of course. Ethically I may have sinned, but I feel that no real harm has been done. Of course, now that you know the real facts my entire career is at stake.”
“There is no question in your mind but what it was suicide?” asked Hatch.
“Not the slightest. Then, too, there was the letter, which was found in Pomeroy Stockton’s pocket. I saw that and if there had been any doubt then it was removed. This letter, I think, was then in Miss Devan’s possession. I presume it is still.”
“Do you know anything about Miss Devan?”
“Nothing, except that she is an adopted daughter, who for some reason retained her own family name. Three or four years ago she had a little love affair, to which John Stockton objected. I believe he was the cause of it being broken off. As a matter of fact, I think at one time he was himself in love with her and she refused to accept him as a suitor. Since that time there has been some slight friction, but I know nothing of this except in a general way from what he has said to me.”
Then Hatch proceeded to carry out the other part of The Thinking Machine’s instructions. This was to see the attorney in whose possession Pomeroy Stockton’s will was supposed to be and to ask him why there had been a delay in the reading of the will.
Hatch found the attorney, Frederick Sloane, without difficulty. Without reservation Hatch laid all the circumstances as he knew them before Mr. Sloane. Then came the question of why the will had not been read. Mr. Sloane, too, was frank.
“It’s because the will is not now in my possession,” he said. “It has either been mislaid, lost, or possibly stolen. I did not care for the family to know this just now, and delayed the reading of the will while I made a search for it. Thus far I have found not a trace. I haven’t even the remotest idea where it is.”
“What does the will provide?” asked Hatch.
“It leaves the bulk of the estate to John Stockton, settles an annuity of $5,000 a year on Miss Devan, gives her the Dorchester house, and specifically cuts off other relatives whom Pomeroy Stockton once accused of stealing an invention he made. The letter, found after Mr. Stockton’s death—”
“You knew of that letter, too?” Hatch interrupted.
“Oh, yes, this letter confirms the will, except, in general terms, it also cuts off Miss Devan.”
“Would it not be to the interest of the other immediate relatives of Stockton, those who were specifically cut off, to get possession of that will and destroy it?”
“Of course it might be, but there has been no communication between the two branches of the family for several years. That branch lives in the far West and I have taken particular pains to ascertain that they could not have had anything to do with the disappearance of the will.”
With these new facts in his possession, Hatch started to report to The Thinking Machine. He had to wait half an hour or so. At last the scientist came in.
“I’ve been attending an autopsy,” he said.
“An autopsy? Whose?”
“On the body of Pomeroy Stockton.”
“Why, I had thought he had been buried.”
“No, only placed in a receiving vault. I had to call the attention of the Medical Examiner to the case in order to get permission to make an autopsy. We did it together.”
“What did you find?” asked Hatch.
“What did you find?” asked The Thinking Machine, in turn.
Briefly Hatch told him of the interview with Dr. Benton and Mr. Sloane. The scientist listened without comment and at the end sat back in his big chair squinting at the ceiling.
“That seems to finish it,” he said. “These are the questions which were presented: First, In what manner did Pomeroy Stockton die? Second, If not suicide, as appeared, what motive was there for anything else? Third, If there was a motive, to whom does it lead? Fourth, What was in the cipher letter? Now, Mr. Hatch, I think I may make all of it clear. There was a cipher in the letter—what may be described as a cipher in five, the figure five being the key to it.
VI
“First, Mr. Hatch,” The Thinking Machine resumed, as he drew out and spread on a table the letter which had been originally placed in his hands by Miss Devan, “the question of whether there was a cipher in this letter was to be definitely decided.
“There are a thousand different kinds of ciphers. One of them, which we will call the arbitrary cipher, is excellently illustrated in Poe’s story, ‘The Gold Bug’. In that cipher, a figure or symbol is made to represent each letter of the alphabet.
“Then, there are book ciphers, which are, perhaps, the safest of all ciphers, because without a clue to the book from which words may be chosen and designated by numbers, no one can solve it.
“It would be useless for me to go into this matter at any length, so let us consider this particular letter as a cipher possibility. A careful study of the letter develops three possible starting points. The first of these is the general tone of the letter. It is not a direct, straight-away statement such as a man about to commit suicide would write unless he had a purpose—that is, a purpose beyond the mere apparent meaning of the letter itself. Therefore we will suppose there was another purpose hidden behind a cipher.
“The second starting point is that offered by the absence of one word. You will see that the word ‘in’ should appear between the word ‘cherished’ and ‘secret’. This, of course, may have been an oversight in writing, the sort of thing anyone might do. But further down we find the third starting point.
“This is the figure seven in parentheses. It apparently has no connection whatever with what precedes or follows. It could not have been an accident. Therefore what did it mean? Was it a crude outward indication of a hurriedly constructed cipher?
“I took the figure seven at first to be a sort of key to the entire letter, always presuming there was a cipher. I counted seven words down from that figure and found the word ‘binding’. Seven words from that down made the next word ‘give’. Together the two words seemed to mean something.
“I stopped there and started back. The seventh word up is ‘and’. The seventh word from ‘and’, still counting backward, seemed meaningless. I pursued that theory of seven all the way through the letter and found only a jumble of words. It was the same way counting seven letters. These letters meant nothing unless each letter was arbitrarily taken to represent another letter. This immediately led to intricacies. I believe always in exhausting simple possibilities first, so I started over again.
“Now what word nearest to the seven meant anything when taken together with it? Not ‘family’, not ‘Bible’, not ‘son’, as the vital words appear from the seven down. Going up from the seven, I did find a word which applied to it and meant something. That was the word ‘page’. I had immediately ‘page seven’. ‘Page’ was the fifth word up from the seven.
“What was the next fifth word, still
