This one
looked like the numerical kind where sets of figures correspond to
the letters of the alphabet, but any fairly shrewd man can find the
clue to that sort after an hour or two's work, and I didn't think
Scudder would have been content with anything so easy. So I
fastened on the printed words, for you can make a pretty good
numerical cypher if you have a key word which gives you the
sequence of the letters.
I tried for hours, but none of the words answered. Then I fell
asleep and woke at Dumfries just in time to bundle out and get into
the slow Galloway train. There was a man on the platform whose
looks I didn't like, but he never glanced at me, and when I caught
sight of myself in the mirror of an automatic machine I didn't
wonder. With my brown face, my old tweeds, and my slouch, I was
the very model of one of the hill farmers who were crowding into
the third-class carriages.
I travelled with half a dozen in an atmosphere of shag and clay
pipes. They had come from the weekly market, and their mouths
were full of prices. I heard accounts of how the lambing had gone
up the Cairn and the Deuch and a dozen other mysterious waters.
Above half the men had lunched heavily and were highly flavoured
with whisky, but they took no notice of me. We rumbled slowly
into a land of little wooded glens and then to a great wide moorland
place, gleaming with lochs, with high blue hills showing northwards.
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