" He nodded
to Sir Henry. "You have only to look out for the arrival of nine
hundred horses and when they get in to see who takes them off the
boat. The thing looks easy."
"It's not so easy as it looks," replied the Baronet. "Evidently
these horses might go to France, Holland or England. That's the
secret in this message. That's where the cipher comes in. The
name of the port is in that cipher somewhere."
"But you can, watch the steamer," said Hargrave, "the Don
Carlos."
The Baronet laughed.
"There's no such steamer!" He got up and began to walk round the
table. "Nine hundred horses," he said. "This thing has got to
stop. They're on the sea now, on the way over from America: We
have got to find out where they will go ashore."
He stopped, stooped over and studied the message which he had
written out and which also lay before him in the three
newspapers.
"It's there," he said, "the name of the port of arrival,
somewhere in those two sentences. But I can't get at it. It's
no cipher that I have ever heard of. It's no one of the hundred
figure or number ciphers that the experts in the department know
anything about.
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