her ship which was posted every day. Excitement ran
high.

Jack had seen no more of Professor Dusenberry, but he had spent a good
deal of leisure time pondering over the code message the queer little
dried up man had sent. Raynor, who had quite a genius for such things,
and spent much time solving the puzzles in magazines and periodicals,
helped him. But they did not make much progress.

Suddenly, however, the night before they were due to reach Southampton,
Jack was sitting staring at the message when, without warning, as such
things sometimes will, the real sense of the message leaped at him from
the page.

"Meet me at _three_ on the paving _stones_, the weather is _fine_ but
got no _specimens_, there is no _suspicion_ as you have _directed_ but
I'm afraid _wrong_."

Taking every fourth word from the dispatch then, it read as follows:

"Three stones. Fine specimens. Suspicion directed wrong."

Jack sat staring like one bewitched as the amazingly simple cipher
revealed itself in a flash after his hours of study. Granted he had
struck the right solution, the message was illuminating enough.
Professor Dusenberry was a dangerous crook, instead of the harmless old
"crank" the passengers had taken him for, and his cipher message was to
a confederate.

But on second thought Jack was inclined to believe that it was merely a
coincidence that placing together every fourth word of the jumbled
message made a dispatch having a perfectly understandable bearing on the
jewel theft. It was impossible to believe that Professor Dusenberry,
mild and self-effacing, could have had a hand in the attack on the
diamond merchant. Jack was sorely perplexed.

He was still puzzling over the matter when the object of his thoughts
appeared in his usual timid manner. He wished to send another dispatch,
he said. While he wrote it out Jack studied the mild, almost benevolent
features of the man known as Prof. Dusenberry.

"But there's one test," he thought to himself. "If the 'fourth word'
test applies to this dispatch also, the Professor is a criminal, of a
dangerous type, in disguise. But he contrived to glance carelessly over
the dispatch when the professor handed it to him and fumbled in his
pocket for a wallet with which to pay for it. Not till the seemingly
mild old man had shuffled out did Jack apply his test to it. The message
read as follows:

"_Columbia_ fast as motor-boat, watch her in Southampton. Am well
and wi