The envelope containing the thirty-two cards reposed in my pocket,
together with the linen-mounted photograph, therefore, clearing the
square old oak table, I opened them out eagerly, while Reggie and the
old man watched me breathlessly.
"The first mentioned in the rhyme is king," I said. "Let us have all
four kings together."
Having arranged them, I placed the four eights, the four knaves, the
queens, aces, sevens, nines and tens, in the order given by the
doggerel.
Reggie was quicker than I was in reading down the first column and
declared it to be a hopeless jumble entirely unintelligible. I read for
myself, and, deeply disappointed, was compelled to admit that the key
was not, after all, to be found there.
Yet I recollected what my friend in Leicester had explained, how the
record would be found in the first letter on each card being read
consecutively from one to another through the whole pack, and tried over
and over again to arrange them in intelligible order, but without any
success. The cipher was just as tantalising and bewildering as it had
ever been.
Whole nights I had spent with Reggie, trying in vain to make something
of it, but failing always, unable to make out one single word.
I transcribed the letters backwards, but the result upon my piece of
paper was the same.
"No," remarked old Hales, "you haven't got hold of it yet. I'm sure,
however, you are near it. That rhyme gives the key--you mark me."
"I honestly believe it does if we could only discover the proper
arrangement," I declared in breathless excitement.
"That's just it," remarked Reggie, in dismay. "That's just where the
ingenuity of the cipher lies. It's so very simple, and yet so
extraordinarily complicated that the possible combinations run into
millions. Think of it!"
"But we have the rhyme which distinctly shows their arrangement:--
"`King Henry the Eighth was a knave to his queen,
He'd one short of seven and nine or ten--'
"That's plain enough, and we ought, of course, to have seen it from the
first," I said.
"Well, try the king of one suit, the eight of another, the knave of
another--and so on," Hales suggested, bending with keen interest over
the faces of the pigmy cards.
Without loss of time I took his advice, and carefully relaid the cards
in the manner he suggested. But again the result was an unintelligible
array of letters, puzzling, baffling and disappointing.