o puzzle the ingenuity of the Chief of the Criminal Investigation
Department of the metropolitan police." He nodded to Sir Henry. "You
have only to look out for the arrival of nine hundred horses and when
they get in to see who takes them off the boat. The thing looks easy."

"It's not so easy as it looks," replied the Baronet. "Evidently these
horses might go to France, Holland or England. That's the secret in this
message. That's where the cipher comes in. The name of the port is in
that cipher somewhere."

"But you can, watch the steamer," said Hargrave, "the Don Carlos."

The Baronet laughed.

"There's no such steamer!" He got up and began to walk round the table.
"Nine hundred horses," he said. "This thing has got to stop. They're on
the sea now, on the way over from America: We have got to find out where
they will go ashore."

He stopped, stooped over and studied the message which he had written
out and which also lay before him in the three newspapers.

"It's there," he said, "the name of the port of arrival, somewhere in
those two sentences. But I can't get at it. It's no cipher that I have
ever heard of. It's no one of the hundred figure or number ciphers that
the experts in the department know anything about. If we knew the port
of arrival we could pick up the clever gentleman who comes to take away
the horses. But what's the port--English, French or Dutch? There are a
score of ports." He struck the paper with his hand. "It's there, my word
for it, if we could only decode the thing."

Then he stood up, his face lifted, his fingers linked behind his
back. He crossed the room and stood looking out at the thin yellow fog
drifting over Piccadilly Circus. Finally he came back, gathered up his
papers and put them in the pocket of his big tweed coat.

"There's one man in Europe," he said, "who can read this thing. That's
the Swiss expert criminologist, old Arnold, of Zurich. He's lecturing at
the Sorbonne in Paris. I'm going to see him."

Then he went out.

Now that, as has been said, is how the thing began. It was the first
episode in the series of events that began to go forward on this
extraordinary night. One will say that the purchasing agent for a great
New York jewel house ought to be accustomed to adventures. The writers
of romance have stimulated that fancy. But the fact is that such persons
are practical people. They never do any of the things that the story
writers tell us. They never carry jewe