the whole mystery--the cryptogram beside Florey's body.
Lately I had been thinking that in all probability to procure the script
had been the direct motive of the murder; and the fact of its theft from
my room seemed to bear me out.

Why wasn't it reasonable to presume that in the last instant of Florey's
life, just before the attack was made, he had attempted to conceal the
script. He had thrown it from him; his death-cry had aroused the
household so that the murderer had no time to seek and procure it. Then
from a hiding place, or even from among a group of the guests, he had
seen me pick it up.

To work out that cryptogram, to read its hidden meaning was the first
and the best thing I could do in the way to solve the mystery of Kastle
Krags. Written originally on parchment, sixty or seventy years before,
it doubtless referred and was in explanation of the secret of the old
manor house--the legend of the treasure, supposedly hidden by Godfrey
Jason in the long ago. I had just toyed with it before. Perhaps I had
had little faith that it was of any real importance. But now, other
avenues had failed, and I was resolved to know the truth if it was
humanly possible to do so. I copied the script again, with great care:

aned
dqbo
aqcd
trkm
fipj
dqbo
seho
ohuy
wvyn
dljn
dtht

Then I began to make a systematic analysis. I noticed first that the
second and the sixth words were identical, indicating--considering the
brevity of the entire message--that it must represent a word of most
frequent use. Of course the articles "a" and "the" occur most often in
any English writing, yet I found it hard to believe that "dqbo"
represented either. In the first place, in a message of that length it
is reasonable to assume that all articles and words not absolutely
necessary to the meaning had been omitted.

Weeks that seemed years before Nealman had told me that, after careful
study, he had been convinced that there was some truth in the legend of
buried treasure. Was it not within the bounds of reason to assume that
this cryptic message revealed the hiding place of the treasure? Working
on this assumption, I made up an imaginary description of some hiding
place, just to see what words occurred with the greatest frequency. I
found at once that the word that would be most likely to be used twice
in a description of that kind would be some measurement--either feet,
yards, m