For the hundredth time he made a systematic list of recurrent symbols,
noting again the puzzling similarity of the twisted signs, but no sign
appeared frequently enough to do vowel work.
To-night somehow the cipher mocked and gibed and goaded him to frenzy.
The mad angles pointing up and down and right and left--it was
impossible to sort them. They danced and blurred and crept
irresistibly into the wrong list.
And in error came solution. Carl glanced intently at the jumbled list
and fell feverishly to working from a different viewpoint. From the
cryptic snarl came presently the single English word in the cipher--his
name. The keen suspicion of his hot brain had, at last, been right.
For every letter in the alphabet, four symbols had been used
interchangeably but whether they pointed up or down or right or left,
their significance was the same. There were no word divisions.
When at last Ronador's frantic message to the Baron lay before him,
Carl was grateful for the quiet monastery days in Houdania with Father
Joda. They had given him an inkling of the language.
Some of the message, to be sure, was missing--for Themar had been
interrupted--and some of it unintelligible. But clear and cold before
his fevered eyes lay the words which marked him irrevocably for the
knife of a hired assassin.
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