bade Bess and George good-by, climbed into her
convertible, and drove home.
“I think I’ll ask Dad what he thinks about that
man Al’s mysterious telephone message,” Nancy
decided as she hopped from the car.
She had often taken some of her puzzling prob-
lems to her father. He, in turn, frequently dis-
cussed his law cases with his daughter and found
Nancy’s suggestions practical.
“You look tired, dear,” Carson Drew observed
as she entered the living room and sank into a
comfortable chair. “Have a big day shopping?”
“I can’t remember when so much ever hap-
pened to me in one day.” Nancy smiled despite
her fatigue.
“I suppose I’ll be getting the bills in a few
days,” her father remarked teasingly.
“It wasn’t just the shopping. Dad,” Nancy re-
turned gravely.
Nancy now plunged into the story of the Ori-
ental shop and the dropped perfume bottle, of
her encounter with the stranger on the train, and
the strange fact of having seen him a short while
ago in a foreign-make car.
“What do you make of it?” she questioned.
Mr. Drew shrugged. “What did he look like?”
“The man seemed very polite, but he had a
cruel look in his eyes.” Nancy gave a brief de-
scription of him.
“Hm,” Mr. Drew mused, “I can’t say I like the
sound of this.”
“I wouldn’t wonder about it,” said Nancy,
“except that the girl in the shop seemed so re-
luctant to sell the perfume. Why do you suppose
she cared whether someone bought it?”
“Maybe she was instructed to save it for spe-
cial customers,” Mr. Drew suggested.
“Dad, you may have something there!” Nancy
exclaimed.
She told her father about Joanne Byrd and
described the office which they had visited to-
gether. She ended by showing him the figures
which she had copied.
“This was almost all of the message,” she ex-
plained. “I didn’t have time to copy the rest. Can
you figure it out?”
Carson Drew studied the sheet of paper. “I’m
not an expert on codes,” he said finally, “but I
suspect this might be one, since the man lied in
saying these figures are market quotations.”
“Can you decipher it?” Nancy asked eagerly.
“I wish I could, but it looks like a complicated
one. It would probably take me days to figure out
what these numbers stand for. Why don’t you
work on it yourself?”
“I don’t know too much about codes,” Nancy
declared, “but perhaps I can learn!”
“I have a book you might use,” her father of-
fered. “It may not help much, since every code
is different. Still, all codes have some features in
common. For instance, in any language certain
words are repeated more frequently than others.
If you can figure out a frequency table, then
look for certain numbers to appear more often
than others, you may get somewhere.”
“I’d like to try,” Nancy said eagerly.
“This will be a good test for your sleuthing
mind,” her father said teasingly. “If you don’t
figure out the code, you can always turn this pa-
per over to an expert.”
“Not until I’ve had a fighting chance at it my-
self,” Nancy answered with spirit.
“I’d really like to help you with this mystery,”
her father said, “but I’m so tied up with this
Clifton case I just can’t tackle anything else right
now.”
Immediately after dinner Mr. Drew retired to
his second-floor study to work on his law case.
Nancy went to her bedroom to read the book on
codes. When she finished, the girl detective took
out the sheet on which she had copied the num-
bers and studied the figures intently.
“I’m sure the numbers stand for letters of the
alphabet,” Nancy told herself. “They must have
been arranged in some pattern.”
For over two hours Nancy tried combination
after combination and applied it to the code.
Nothing showed up until she hit upon the plan
of four letters of the alphabet in sequence by
number, the next four in reverse. Alternating in
this manner and leaving two in the end bracket,
Nancy scrutinized what she had worked out:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M