uncheon-basket at Leeds and shared it with the fat
woman. Also I got the morning's papers, with news about starters for
the Derby and the beginning of the cricket season, and some paragraphs
about how Balkan affairs were settling down and a British squadron was
going to Kiel.

When I had done with them I got out Scudder's little black pocket-book
and studied it. It was pretty well filled with jottings, chiefly
figures, though now and then a name was printed in. For example, I
found the words 'Hofgaard', 'Luneville', and 'Avocado' pretty often,
and especially the word 'Pavia'.

Now I was certain that Scudder never did anything without a reason, and
I was pretty sure that there was a cypher in all this. That is a
subject which has always interested me, and I did a bit at it myself
once as intelligence officer at Delagoa Bay during the Boer War. I
have a head for things like chess and puzzles, and I used to reckon
myself pretty good at finding out cyphers. This one looked like the
numerical kind where sets of figures correspond to the letters of the
alphabet, but any fairly shrewd man can find the clue to that sort
after an hour or two's work, and I didn't think Scudder would have been
content with anything so easy. So I fastened on the printed words, for
you can make a pretty good numerical cypher if you have a key word
which gives you the sequence of the letters.

I tried for hours, but none of the words answered. Then I fell asleep
and woke at Dumfries just in time to bundle out and get into the slow
Galloway train. There was a man on the platform whose looks I didn't
like, but he never glanced at me, and when I caught sight of myself in
the mirror of an automatic machine I didn't wonder. With my brown
face, my old tweeds, and my slouch, I was the very model of one of the
hill farmers who were crowding into the third-class carriages.

I travelled with half a dozen in an atmosphere of shag and clay pipes.
They had come from the weekly market, and their mouths were full of
prices. I heard accounts of how the lambing had gone up the Cairn and
the Deuch and a dozen other mysterious waters. Above half the men had
lunched heavily and were highly flavoured with whisky, but they took no
notice of me. We rumbled slowly into a land of little wooded glens and
then to a great wide moorland place, gleaming with lochs, with high
blue hills showing northwards.

About five o'clock the carriage had emptied, and I was l