“Thanks, my dear man, simply thanks.  That’s a rare thing for a well-to-do man to get since the I.W.W. proved to the world that it’s a crime for a man to own more than ten dollars, or even to earn it!  But I wish you would drop me off about half a block from the Somerset Apartments, on Fifty-sixth Street.  I want to watch for a late arrival.”

He waited in the shadows of the houses on the opposite side of the street.  After half an hour he was rewarded by the sight of Mr. Shine Taylor dismounting from a taxicab.  The young gentleman wore a heavy overcoat over a bedraggled suit.  One of his snowy spats was missing; his hat was dripping, still, from its early immersion.  He entered the building, after a cautious survey of the deserted street, with a stiff and exhausted gait.

Shirley was satisfied with this new knot in the string.  He returned to his rooms at the club, to gain fresh strength for the trailing on the morrow.  And this time, he felt that he deserved his rest!

Next morning, after his usual plunge and rub-down, he ordered breakfast in his rooms.  He instructed the clerk to send up a Remwood typewriter, and began his experiments with the code of the diary.

From an old note-book, in which were tabulated the order of letter recurrences according to their frequency in ordinary English words, he freshened his memory.  This was the natural sequence, in direct ratio to the use of the letters:  “E:  T:  A:  O:  N:  I:  S:  B:  M, etc.”  The use of “E” was double that of any other.  Yet on the pages of the book he found that the most frequently recurring symbol was “R” which was, ordinarily, one of the least used in the alphabet.  “T,” which would have been second in popularity, naturally, was seen only a few times in proportion.  “Y,” also seldom used, appeared very often.  The symbol “A” was used with surprising frequency.

“Let me see,” he mused.  “This code is strictly typewritten.  It must be arranged on some mechanical twist of the typing method.  A is used so many times that it might be safe to assume that it is used for a space, as all the words in this code run together.  If A is used that way, what takes its place?  S would by rights be seventh on the list, but the average I have made shows that it is about third or fourth.”

Carefully he jotted down in separate columns on a piece of paper the individual repetitions of letters on the page of “January 7, 1915.”  He arrived at the conclusion, then, that “R” was used for “E,” that “S” took the place of “A” and that “Y” alternated in this cipher for “T” which was second on his little list.

Fur the benefit of the reader who may be interested enough to work out this little problem, along the lines of Shirley’s deductions the arrangement of the so-called “Standard” keyboard is here shown, as it was on the “Number Four” machine of Warren’s Remwood, and the duplicate machine which Shirley was using.