Whether or not Florey had possessed a copy I wasn't able to
remember for certain.

It must have been a grim old joke to Jason--to use the Holy Word to
transmit the record of his iniquity! In an instant I was burrowing, not
a little excited, into the bottom of my bag for a small copy of the
Bible that I carried with me on every journey.

Apart from religious reasons, there is no better traveling companion
for a knowledge-loving man than King James' Bible. The font of all
literature, the mighty well of inspiration, the record of the ages--it
was beloved not only of the scientist and historian, but the literati
and the esthete. Hardly a week had passed that I hadn't referred to it,
in one capacity or another. And now I felt that I was on the right track
at last.

There is no book in such common usage, published with such fidelity as
to the position of every word, so easily procured in any place or time,
as the Holy Bible. It would be the perfect code-book. Certainly it could
be used to the greatest advantage as the key to a cryptogram.

But what had been the method of its use? In what way could these
four-letter words, none of which were intelligible, be made through the
agency of the Bible to present an intelligent meaning? Again I found
myself relying on inductive reasoning. I worked backward, just as I had
done before, trying to see some way to convey a secret meaning through
the agency of this universally read book.

All at once I saw the way. The Bible contained almost every word in the
present English vocabulary. In all probability each one of the words in
the column represented some English word to be found somewhere in the
Bible, and the column of them, written out, would be the message in
full.

How to find that word was the only problem that remained. True, it
looked formidable enough at first. Yet I saw in a moment that the
four-letter words could not represent the words of the message
themselves, but only their _position_ in the Bible.

My mind was working clearly now, leaping from one conclusion to another;
and reasoning deductively I tried to work out some method of secret
writing whereby I could reveal to another person the position of a
certain word I wanted him to know. Suppose, for instance, that Jason
wished to use the word "feet" in his message. Looking through the Bible
he found the word--say on page 86, third line, fourth word. It was
conceivable that he might send the numbers "86-3-4" to some