Hitherto I had mainly admired Mrs. Packard’s person and the extreme
charm of manner which never deserted her, no matter how she felt. Now I
found myself compelled to admire the force and quality of her mind, her
readiness to meet emergencies and the tact with which she had availed
herself of the superstition latent in the Irish temperament. For I had
no more faith in the explanation she had seen fit to give these ignorant
girls than I had in the apparition itself. Emotion such as she had shown
called for a more matter-of-fact basis than the one she had ascribed
to it. No unreal and purely superstitious reason would account for
the extreme joy and self-abandonment with which she had hailed the
possibility of Mr. Steele’s death. The “no” she had given me when I
asked if she considered this man her husband’s enemy had been a lying
no. To her, for some cause as yet unexplained, the secretary was a
dangerous ally to the man she loved; an ally so near and so dangerous
that the mere rumor of his death was capable of lifting her from the
depths of despondency into a state of abnormal exhilaration and hope.
Now why? What reason had she for this belief, and how was it in my power
to solve the mystery which I felt to be at the bottom of all the rest?
But one means suggested itself. I was now assured that Mrs. Packard
would never take me into her actual confidence, any more than she had
taken her husband. What I learned must be in spite of her precautions.
The cipher of which I had several specimens might, if properly read,
give me the clue I sought. I had a free hour before me. Why not
employ it in an endeavor to pick out the meaning of those odd Hebraic
characters? I had in a way received her sanction to do so--if I could;
and if I should succeed, what shadows might it not clear from the path
of the good man whose interests it was my chief duty to consult?
Ciphers have always possessed a fascination for me. This one, from the
variety of its symbols, offered a study of unusual interest. Collecting
the stray specimens which I had picked up, I sat down in my cozy little
room and laid them all out before me, with the following result:
__________________________
[transcriber’s note: the symbols cannot be converted to ASCII so I have
shown them as follows:]
[] is a Square
[-] is sides and bottom of a square,
C is top, bottom and left side of a square,
L is left side and bottom of a square,,
V is two lines forming a V shape
. appearing before a symbol should be inside the symbol
) appearing before a symbol means the mirror image of that symbol
^ appearing before a symbol means the inverted symbol
? is a curve inside the symbol
all other preceding symbols are my best approximation for shapes shown
inside that symbol.
; is used to separate each symbol __________________________
1. []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <;
2. []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <; L; ).L; <; )7;.7;
3. []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <; ).L;.C;[];.L; >;,C; [];.<; ^[-]; ^[-];.<;
4. []; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <; <; L; >; ^V; L; V; []; )L; ^V; [-]; []; V;
).C; ^[-]; >; )C; ),C; V; <; C; ^V; ^[-];.>; [-]; <;
5. *>; []; V; []; *V; []; ~7; )C;.>; ^[o]; )L; ^V; []; Lo; ^V; )C; )7*;
V; )C?; L; )L; 7;.>;.^[-]; )L; >; <;:[-], [-]; Lo;.<;?[-]; )7; [-]; )C;
[];.C; [-]; *7; L;.7; ^V; )o7; *>; C; ^V;.C;.<; [-]; []; 7;.C; )L;:7;
[-]; )*L; C; ^V;.L;.>; ^[%]; C; 7; *L; 7; ):L; )7; ^.V; []; [-];.L;[-]
No. 1: My copy of the characters, as I remember seeing them on the
envelope which Mrs. Packard had offered to Mr. Steele and afterward
thrown into the fire.
Nos. 2, 3 and 4: The discarded scraps I had taken from the waste-basket
in her room.
No. 5: The lengthy communication in another hand, which Mrs. Packard had
found pinned on the baby’s cloak, and at my intercession had handed over
to me.
A goodly array, if the latter was a specimen of the same cipher as
the first, a fact which its general appearance seemed to establish,
notwithstanding the few added complexities observable in it, and one
which a remembrance of her extreme agitation on opening it would have
settled in my mind, even if these complexities had been greater and
the differences even more pronounced than they were. Lines entirely
unsuggestive of meaning to her might have aroused her wonder and
possibly her anger, but not her fear; and the emotion which I chiefly
observed in her at that moment had been fear.
So! out of these one hundred and fifty characters, many of them mere
repetitions, it remained for me to discover a key whereby their meaning
might be rendered intelligible.
To begin, then, what peculiarities were first observable in them?
Several.
First: The symbols followed one after the other without breaks, whether
the communication was limited to one word or to many.
Second: Nos. 2, 3 and 4 started with the identical characters which made
up No. 1.
Third: While certain lines in Nos. 2, 3 and 4 were heavier than others,
no such distinction was observable in the characters forming No. 1.
Fourth: This distinction was even more marked in the longer specimen
written by another hand, viz.: No. 5.
Fifth: This distinction, which we will call shading, occurred
intermittently, sometimes in two consecutive characters, but never in
three.
Sixth: This shading was to be seen now on one limb of the character it
apparently emphasized and now on another.
Seventh: In the three specimens of the seven similar characters
commencing Nos. 2, 3 and 4, the exact part shaded was not always the
same as for instance, it was the left arm of the second character in No.
2 which showed the heavy line, while the shading was on the right-hand
arm of the corresponding character in No. 3.
Eighth: These variations of emphasis in No. 4 coincided sometimes with
those seen in No. 2 and again with those in No. 3.
Ninth: Each one of these specimens, saving the first, ended in a shaded
character.
Tenth: While some of the characters were squares or parts of a square,
others were in the shape of a Y turned now this way and now that.
Eleventh: These characters were varied by the introduction of dots, and,
in some cases, by the insertion of minute sketches of animals, birds,
arrows, signs of the zodiac, etc., with here and there one of a
humorous, possibly sarcastic, nature.
Twelfth: Dots and dots only were to be found in the specimen emanating
from Mrs. Packard’s hand; birds, arrows, skipping boys and hanging men,
etc., being confined to No. 5, the product of another brain and hand, at
present unknown.
Now what conclusions could I draw from these? I shall give them to you
as they came to me that night. Others with wits superior to my own may
draw additional and more suggestive ones:
First: Division into words was not considered necessary or was made in
some other way than by breaks.
Second: The fact of the shading being omitted from No. 1 meant
nothing--that specimen being my own memory of lines, the shading or
non-shading of which would hardly have attracted my attention.
Third: The similarity observable in the seven opening characters of the
first four specimens being taken as a proof of their standing for the
same word or phrase, it was safe to consider this word or phrase as a
complete one to which she had tried to fit others, and always to her
dissatisfaction, till she had finally rejected all but the simple one
with which she had started.
Fourth: No. 1, short as it was, was, therefore, a communication in
itself.
Fifth: The shading of a character was in some way essential to its
proper understanding, but not the exact place where that shading fell.
Sixth: The dots were necessarily modifications, but not their shape or
nature.
Seventh: This shading might indicate the end of a word.
Eighth: If so, the shading of two contiguous characters would show the
first one to be a word of one letter. There are but two words in the
English language of one letter--a and i--and in the specimens before
me but one character, that of [], which shows shading, next to another
shaded character.
Ninth: [] was therefore a or i
A decided start.
All this, of course, was simply preliminary.
The real task still lay before me. It was to solve the meaning of
those first seven characters, which, if my theory were correct, was a
communication in itself, and one of such importance that, once mastered,
it would give the key to the whole situation.
[]; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <;
or with the shading (same in bold - transcriber)
[]; V; [];.>; V; [-]; <;
You have all read The Gold Bug, and know something of the method by
which a solution is obtained by that simplest of all ciphers, where a
fixed character takes the place of each letter in the alphabet.
Let us see if it applies to this one.
There are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet. Are there
twenty-six or nearly twenty-six different characters, in the one hundred
and one I find inscribed on the various slips spread out before me?
No, there are but fourteen. A check to begin with.
But wait; the dots make a difference. Let us increase the list by
assuming that angles or squares thus marked are different letters from
those of the same shape in which no dots or sketches occur, and we bring
the list up to twenty. That is better.
The dotted or otherwise marked squares or angles are separate
characters.
Now, which one of these appears most frequently? The square, which we
have already decided must be either a or i. In the one short word or
phrase we are at present considering, it occurs twice. Now supposing
that this square stands for a, which according to Poe’s theory it
should, a coming before s in the frequency in which it occurs in
ordinary English sentences, how would the phrase look (still according
to Poe) with dashes taking the place of the remaining unknown letters?
Thus
A-a ---- if the whole is a single word.
A- a- -- if the whole is a phrase. That it was a phrase I was convinced,
possibly because one clings to so neat a theory as the one which makes
the shading, so marked a feature in all the specimens before us, the
sign of division into words. Let us take these seven characters as a
phrase then and not as a word. What follows?
The dashes following the two a’s stand for letters, each of which should
make a word when joined to a. What are these letters? Run over the
alphabet and see. The only letters making sense when joined with a are
h, m, n, s, t or x. Discarding the first and the last, we have these
four words, am, an, as, at. Is it possible to start any intelligible
phrase with any two of these arranged in any conceivable way? No. Then
[] can not stand for a. Let us see if it does for i. The words of two
letters headed by i we find to be if, in, is and it. A more promising
collection than the first. One could easily start a phrase with any of
these, even with any two of them such as If it, Is in, Is it, It is. []
is then the symbol of i, and some one of the above named combinations
forms the beginning of the short phrase ending with a word of three
letters symbolized by V [-].<
What word?
If my reasoning is correct up to this point, it should not be hard to
determine.
First, one of these three symbols, the V, is a repetition of one of
those we have already shown to be s, t, f, or n. Of the remaining two,
[-] <, one must be a vowel, that is, it must be either u, e, o, u, or y;
i being already determined upon. Now how many [-]’s and <’s do we find
in the collection before us? Ten or more of the first, and six, or about
six, of the latter. Recalling the table made out by Poe--a table I once
learned as a necessary part of my schooling as a cipher interpreter--I
ran over it thus: e is the one letter most in use in English. Afterward
the succession runs thus a, o, i d, h, n, r, etc. There being then ten
[-]’s to six <’s [-] must be a vowel, and in all probability the vowel
e, as no other character in the whole collection, save the plentiful
squares, is repeated so often.
I am a patient woman usually, but I was nervous that night, and,
perhaps, too deeply interested in the outcome to do myself justice. I
could think of no word with a for one of its three letters which would
make sense when added on to It is, Is it, I f it, Is in.
Conscious of no mistake, yet always alive to the possibility of one, I
dropped the isolated scrap I was working upon and took up the longer and
fuller ones, and with them a fresh line of reasoning. If my argument
so far had been trustworthy, I should find, in these other specimens, a
double [-][-] standing for the double e so frequently found in English.
Did I find such? No. Another shock to my theory.
Should I, then, give it up? Not while another means of verification
remained. The word the should occur more than once in a collection of
words as long as the one before me. If U is really e, I should find
it at the end of the supposed thes. Do I so find it? There are several
words scattered through the whole, of only three letters. Are any of
them terminated by U? Not one. My theory is false, then, and I must
begin all over.
Discarding every previous conclusion save this, that the shading of a
line designated the termination of a word, I hunted first for the
thes. Making a list of the words containing only three letters, I was
confronted by the following:
V [-] <
)L )C C
< L >
^V L V. < C ^V. .>.[-]) )L. .V ).C L.
.<.[-] )7
^V C 7
)L.L >
No two alike. Astonishing! Thirty-two words of English and only one the
in the whole? Could it be that the cipher was in a foreign language?
The preponderance of i’s so out of proportion to the other vowels had
already given me this fear, but the lack of thes seemed positively to
indicate it. Yet I must dig deeper before accepting defeat.
Th is a combination of letters which Poe says occurs so often in our
language that they can easily be picked out in a cipher of this length.
How many times can a conjunction of two similar characters be found in
the lines before us..>.[-] occurs three times, which is often enough,
perhaps, to establish the fact that they stand for th. Do I find them
joined with a third character in the list of possible thes? Yes..> [-]
which would seem to fix both the th and the e.
But I have grown wary and must make myself sure. Do I find a word in
which this combination of. >.[-] occurs twice, as sometimes happens with
the th we are considering? No, but I find two other instances in which
like contiguous symbols do appear twice in one word; the.<.[-] in No. 3
and the.V.)C in No. 4--a discovery the most embarrassing of all, since
in both cases the symbols which begin the word are reversed at its end,
as witness:.V.)C - - - )C .V --.<.[-] - - -.[-].<. For, if.V )C stands
for th, and the whole word showed in letters th- - -ht, which to any eye
suggests the word thought, what does.<.[-] stand for, concerning which
the same conditions are observable?
I could not answer. I had run on a snag.
Rules which applied to one part of the cipher failed in another. Could
it be that a key was necessary to its proper solution? I began to think
so, and, moreover, that Mrs. Packard had made use of some such help as
I watched her puzzling in the window over these symbols. I recalled her
movements, the length of time which elapsed before the cry of miserable
understanding escaped her lips, the fact that her dress was torn apart
at the throat when she came out, and decided that she had not only drawn
some paper from her bosom helpful to the elucidation of these symbols,
but that this paper was the one which had been the object of her frantic
search the night I watched her shadow on the wall.
So convinced was I by these thoughts that any further attempt to solve
the cryptogram without such aid as I have mentioned would end by leaving
me where I was at present,--that is, in the fog,--that I allowed the
lateness of the hour to influence me; and, putting aside my papers, I
went to bed. If I had sat over them another hour, should I have been
more fortunate? Make the attempt yourself and see.