finding life such a bad thing after all.
Bryce worried me but little. At times I went odd messages for him, but
all my trips were so arranged that I was never away from the house more
than half an hour at a time. The more I thought over the mystery
surrounding him the deeper and more inexplicable it became. I knew of
whom he was afraid, but I had no more idea of the reason of his fear
than I had of the name of the man in the moon. My occupation was more
reminiscent of revolutionary South America than of a civilised country,
and the thought of it set me wondering whether Bryce had ever lived
amongst the volatile Latins on the other side of the Pacific. Come to
think of it the one man I had seen closely had been a dark type. It was
just barely possible that Bryce had somehow tangled himself in something
of the kind. But then that cipher business--I was fully convinced by now
that it was some original kind of cryptogram--rather pointed the other
way. One of the things I had noticed had been a L sign, and anything
dealing with any of the Latin Republics would almost assuredly have been
written with a $ sign. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that I had
been barking up the wrong tree.

I jotted down the figures that I remembered, but I must have had some of
the signs down wrong, for, try as I would, I could make nothing out of
them. As a matter of fact the solution was so simple that in the end I
only stumbled on it by accident.

Bryce had a bad habit of locking himself in his room for hours at a
time, and it occurred to me that such a course wasn't in his own
interest any more than mine, so I tackled him about it at the first
opportunity.

"Here you are," I said, "paying me for being a mixture of Swiss Guard
and watch-dog, but for all the looking-after you get I might as well be
miles away. I don't want to be hanging on to your skirts every ten
minutes or so, but doesn't it strike you as a reasonable man that you're
inviting trouble by locking yourself in so securely?"

"I do that so I won't be disturbed," he urged.

"That's a reason that cuts both ways," I said. "Suppose somebody
happened to be in the room when you arrived. Don't you see that he could
do all he wanted to do without being disturbed either."

"But you'd hear any uncommon noise," Bryce objected.

"Maybe I would and then maybe I wouldn't. I'm not infallible, you know,
and anyway it's quite possible that any visitor you had wouldn't make a
row at all.