scrawled on the piece of paper around her key on the first night she had come here, and which, had it been embodied in a message and not preceded by the 999, would have meant simply the addition of seven, three and nine, that is, nineteen—and therefore would indictate the nineteenth letter of the alphabet, S.
Rhoda Gray copied the first line of the message on the piece of wrapping paper:
321010333203202306663103330111102210444202101112052110761
Adding the numerals between the zeros, and giving to each its corresponding letter, she set down the result:
6010110505022090405014030509014 f a k e e v i d e n c e i n
It was then but a matter of grouping the letters into words; and, decoded, the first line read:
Fake evidence in ......
She worked steadily on. It was a lengthy message, and it took her a long time. It was an hour, perhaps more, after Danglar had gone, before she had completed her task; and then, after that, she sat for still a long time staring, not at the paper on the chair before her, but at the flickering shadows thrown by the candle on the opposite wall.
Queer and strange were the undercurrents and the cross-sections of life that were to be found, amazingly contradictory, amazingly incomprehensible, once one scratched beneath the surface of the poverty and the squalor, and, yes, the crime, amongst the hiving thousands of New York's East Side! In the days—not
