“That’s easily taken care of, Ted. I can promise you exactly that, and nothing more. You can even be sure it will be the right table, for I haven’t had time to prepare a faked one.”
“Then, the second thing is that I would have to know that I was acting in the best interests of the Fontaines. I couldn’t do anything that would be disloyal to them. That means I would have to know a little more about your background and what you’re doing here. It’s obvious that you have some connection with the Frantons, or you would hardly be so interested in a message found in their old chair.”
Cox tapped on the desk as he meditated. “You drive a hard bargain, Ted. I admit I’ve been suspicious of you from the first, ever since I learned that you were a newspaper reporter. Newspapermen have a way of nosing into everything, and I wasn’t sure whether publicity would be helpful to my cause or extremely harmful. Are you sure this isn’t a newspaper story for you?”
“No, it’s nothing of the kind. I’m willing to do anything that will help you, as long as it doesn’t hurt the Fontaines.”
“I believe you, Ted. As a matter of fact, one of my reasons for going to town today was to make inquiries about you. I had a number of things to call back home about, and your name came up. That may be the reason why my return call was so long delayed.”
“What did you find out?” asked Ted curiously.
“About you, nothing, but a good deal about Mr. Dobson and the Town Crier. If you’re an associate of Mr. Dobson, that’s good enough for me. But you have your loyalty, Ted, and I have mine. If our loyalties do not conflict, we can be friends. Otherwise we will be opponents. Right now my loyalty is to a person whose name I don’t even know, and for all I can tell may not even exist.”
“That’s a strange kind of loyalty,” said Ted with a smile.
“It is, but we run into it quite often in my business. Let me explain who I am. My father was the attorney for the Frantons, and I suppose that now he is looking out for the interests of the heirs—if there is an heir, and if there is an estate. You can see what I mean about my loyalty being to a person who may not exist. I’m still in law school, and I work as my father’s clerk. Have I told you enough so that you will trust me with the first five letters of the message? If so, I can explain how this table works, which is as good a place as any to begin.”
Referring to the message, Ted wrote these five letters on a piece of paper which he put on the desk:
W M K T Y
Cox took the table from his pocket and spread it out on the desk. “This is called a Vigenère table, and you are correct that it is a code—or to use the more accurate term, a cipher. If you have any idea that we’re going to be able to read this message right off, you can forget it. We’re still lacking one important ingredient. Now let’s imagine a secret word that was used to write this message.”
“What sort of word would make a good secret word?” asked Ted.
“Well, it shouldn’t be too short, and it’s better if it has no repeated letters in it, and if it contains a letter close to the end of the alphabet. Just suggest something.”
Ted thought rapidly. “How about ‘Maryland’?” he suggested.
“All right, Maryland, though the A is repeated,” Cox agreed. “We’ll put the first five letters down like this.”
W M K T Y
M A R Y L
“Now we use this table to combine letters. We find W on one of the normal alphabets, and M on the other, and see where they meet. Let’s see, W and M gives us F. That’s not bad for a first letter, so let’s go on. M and A gives us I as a second letter. Things are looking up a little. Now K and R, and that gives us R. Our first three letters are FIR, which isn’t bad at all. Now T and Y. That gives us L, FIRL. Not very good at all. I think we’ve had it, and it was just coincidence that the first three letters seemed pretty good, but we’ll try the last one. Y and L gives us T, and our word becomes FIRLT. No, that won’t do at all. For a moment I thought we had stumbled on the real secret word, but I guess not.” He put down his pencil in exasperation.
“How about ‘Baltimore’?” Ted suggested.
“Well, all right, if you’re following out a hunch.” He calculated for a minute. “That gives us QIQPN. That’s much worse than the other.”
“Were you telling the truth when you said this table wasn’t of much value to you, or did you simply mean that you didn’t expect to find the message?”
“What I meant, Ted, was that if the table was destroyed, it wouldn’t matter much to me, because I could easily make up a new copy.”
“You mean that you’ve memorized this whole table?” asked Ted incredulously.
“Hardly that, Ted. But I made up the table in the first place. If you were to cut up this table in long strips, and arrange the top alphabet so that it spells out VICTORY, followed by all the remaining letters of the alphabet in order, then you would find the word VICTORY in reverse on each of the lines below. You could then cut the table in the other direction, across the lines, and do the same thing with the alphabet on the side.”
“That’s very clever.” But Ted still remained doubtful. “How do I know that you don’t already know the secret word, and are simply holding out on me?”
“Well, I guess there’s really no good way to prove it, Ted, any more than I can prove that you didn’t fake this message. But perhaps if I told you more about this business, it would convince you.
“My father did not know Mr. Franton before the day he walked into our office, and we never saw or heard from him afterward. In a way, he wasn’t even sure that he wanted to consult an attorney. He was reluctant to tell the whole story to us so there didn’t seem much we could do for him.
“He had a secret of some sort, but couldn’t quite bring himself to divulge it. He wanted his interests protected in case something should happen to him, but was prepared to handle matters for himself if it didn’t. As you see, he didn’t fully trust lawyers. My father suggested he make out a will, but he didn’t think it would be of much use at that time, and the truth is that he appeared to possess very little property—in fact, he seemed darned near broke.
“Another lawyer would have handed him his walking papers, but my father gets intrigued by things like this. I’d been a bug on cryptography, and he suggested that I give Mr. Franton a secret system for writing messages. It happened that I had this table already prepared, so I gave Mr. Franton a copy and told him how to use it. Later he could send us a message written in cipher, but he would retain the secret key word, which he would carry around with him in his wallet. If something should happen to him, there would be no secret message found that could get into the wrong hands, possibly turned over to some expert who could break it. My father would probably be informed about the secret word, following instructions in Mr. Franton’s wallet, but if we learned of his death and did not know the secret word, we could turn the message over to an expert ourselves to see what could be done with it. If this all seems unnecessarily complicated to you, it fitted Mr. Franton’s personality perfectly. He asked a lot of questions about this cipher system, until he knew how to use it, was satisfied that it was safe enough, and that I could not break it.”
“Just how safe is it?” asked Ted.
“If both the table and the key word are kept secret, if messages are short and infrequent, and perhaps the key word changed with later messages, then it would challenge the skill of the best experts. If the table were known but the key word was secret, then it would be easier, but still couldn’t be read by just any person who happened along. I told him the truth when I said that I wouldn’t be able to break it without the key word, provided he observed the precautions I just mentioned. This seemed to satisfy him.
“Then he walked out of our office, but not out of our lives. He did not write us a message immediately, probably because he didn’t have the information he needed, but we expected to receive it shortly. We never did, and would have thought that he had changed his mind about having us represent hi
m, except that he had apparently given our office as a mailing address. One of the things we received was a bill for a large insurance policy, much larger than a man in his circumstances would normally carry, suggesting that perhaps he had been quite affluent at one time. We couldn’t reach him, and it seemed a shame to let his policy lapse, so my father paid the premium. That was a year ago, and we’ve just received the notice for another annual premium. My father is good-hearted, but how long should this thing go on?
“Mr. Franton hadn’t told us much, but he did say he had a secret, he mentioned heirs, and he did let slip a reference to Sandy Hill. Of course that didn’t help us much, for there are hundreds of Sandy Hills in our country. But a few days ago, when I saw a brief mention of a plane crash on Sandy Hill, I had a hunch about it, flew out here, and picked up the trail of the Frantons. I came out here partly to find any message Mr. Franton might have left, partly for the key word I would need to read it, and partly for any other clues I might pick up. Have I told you enough to convince you that I don’t know the secret word? Certainly Mr. Franton wouldn’t have given both the message and the key word to me, for then he might as well have told me the whole thing straight out.”
“But he didn’t give you the message,” Ted reasoned. “How do I know that he didn’t give you the key word, while with-holding the message?”
“Then the message might have fallen into the wrong hands, while a key word alone would be useless. I have an idea he didn’t quite know whether to trust somebody or not. And I think it is obvious that he did intend to send the message to me, and only placed it in the chair temporarily, but the fire came too soon.”
“All right, you’ve convinced me.” Ted made a copy of the message, and gave it to Cox. “If you do find the right key word, will you let me know?”
“Yes, if the interests of my client permit. Otherwise, no, obviously. But you might enjoy hunting for it yourself. A key word is usually one that a person would never forget. I talked with Jake Pastor to try and pick up local names and local gossip.”
“One more thing,” said Ted, as Cox folded up his copy and put it in his pocket, leaving the Vigenère table for Ted, “do you think Mr. Franton’s secret had anything to do with oil?”
Cox gave him a shrewd glance. “Yes, it might have been about oil, or about one of a hundred other things I could mention,” and he turned and left the room.
CHAPTER 12.
LOST
Oil! The possibility was an exciting one. Suppose there was oil on Sandy Hill. Who was the rightful owner, would he get his rights, or was the whole thing up for grabs? Simply suspecting the presence of oil there was not enough. There would still remain the vast task of organization and financing. The chances were that Jeff Leonard, and whoever he was associated with, had already beaten everyone on the matter of leases; for everyone else it would be too late.
As they had already discussed the possibility of prospecting, Nelson was not particularly surprised by Ted’s suggestion of oil.
“If anybody’s going to have some good luck, then bully for them. Is that what you and Cox were talking about? I saw you up here, but didn’t want to intrude.”
Ted told him about the code message and what Cox had said.
“Well, that seems to answer a good many questions, but not the most important ones,” Nelson remarked. “He told you what he was doing, but he didn’t tell you what he was doing here.”
Ted was surprised. Thinking back, he realized that Nelson was correct, and this started a new chain of thought for him.
“Nel, there’s something we’ve been missing. Let me mention a few random things and see if they can be put together. I went to Monroe, and read newspaper accounts of two things: Tony’s arrival, and the Franton fire. I couldn’t find anything else that seemed to relate to this community at all. It’s a good rule, when two unusual things happen, to look for a. connection between them, but there doesn’t appear to be any connection at all. Then Cox mentioned the possibility of heirs, but he didn’t explain why he chose to come to this farm. All right, one more thing. We went to the auction this morning, but one thing there seemed very much out of place. What was it? Think about everything that went up for sale.”
Nelson ran through the list in his own mind. “You mean that little wagon?”
“Yes. Why a wagon? It was too little to be useful. It was really a toy. Are you with me?”
Nelson whistled. “I’m right there with you, Ted. This is beginning to sound deep, deep, deep. But there are still plenty of things that have to be explained if your theory is going to hold water. If Tony is really the Frantons’ little girl, why is it that nobody knew anything about her?”
“I can only offer some possibilities. They were newcomers here, and nobody knew very much about the family. Nobody really had a chance to get acquainted. It’s true that Bob rode over to talk with them, and maybe some of the other neighbors did, too, but maybe it just happened that they didn’t see the little girl, and no mention was made of her. It’s also possible that Mr. Franton was keeping her hidden for some reason, though it’s hard to see why. Surely he couldn’t have hoped to hide her for very long.
“Another difficulty is that there was a two weeks’ lapse between the fire and Tony’s arrival here. She was well cared for, and couldn’t have been wandering around by herself for that long a time. If that was true, then somebody does know more about Tony than has ever come out. But if anyone else ever suspected Tony was the Frantons’ daughter, the idea must have been abandoned, for the two things seemed too far apart.
“We do know, at least, that Cox suspected it, and that is why he chose this farm, and why he took all those pictures of Tony. I’ve been critical of him before, but if this is what he suspected, I certainly give him credit for keeping the thing quiet until he could check into it. There was no use getting the Fontaines all upset over it, until he was able to prove it.”
“Does it really matter who Tony is, Ted? The Fontaines wanted to adopt her anyway, and her real parents are dead.”
This was the one point Ted could not talk quite frankly about. “Well, if her identity could be established, it might make things run more smoothly on this adoption business. And Cox did mention a large insurance policy, which would be payable to her, plus the fact that she would be the heir to any other property the Frantons might have possessed.”
“What do we do now, Ted?”
“It’s hard to know just what we can do. Cox is working on it already, and if we are both working on behalf of Tony, then it would seem that we are allies. One thing I want to do is to check into this oil business a little more so I’ll know what I’m talking about. Is there a library around here somewhere?”
“Bob. and I are planning to drive over to Weymouth tomorrow for a new part for the tractor. There might be one there.”
“If there is, I’ll go along.”
When it came time for the three boys to leave in the morning, Tony begged so hard to go with them that the visitors felt sorry for her. Bob and his mother had agreed beforehand that the trip would be too long for her, but though Bob would have relented, his mother did not.
As they drove along, Ted and Nelson were weighed down by the secret they were keeping from Bob, and the restraint this placed on the conversation, but Bob did not seem to notice.
“You should hear Jake Pastor carrying on about his horse,” Bob related. “He claims it’s the smartest critter ever born. He tells about how he sends her to fetch his pipe, and she walks right up to the window, sticks her head in, and brings the pipe back to him. Funny thing, though, she won’t give up the pipe until he lights it and she takes a few puffs first. Then if Jake sees he’s got a good audience, he’ll go on and tell about his horse jumping rope. He gets on her back and holds the rope in his two hands, and she’ll get up on her hind legs and jump as high as a hundred and seventeen. And she blows smoke rings all the while, too!”
“Now I just might be able to believe in a horse learning to fetch a pip
e,” Nelson decided, “but the jumping rope and the smoke rings make it a little too much. Wouldn’t Jake be better off if he toned his stories down a little, so somebody would believe him?”
“Oh, I don’t think he cares whether anyone believes him or not.”
Arriving at Weymouth, Bob and Nelson went off in search of their equipment, while Ted stopped in at the library, found a book on the subject of oil, and was soon engrossed in this interesting study.
Oil, so the present theory ran, was formed from sea plants and animals which settled to the bottom, became covered with sediment, and slowly decomposed. It was advantageous if the water was stagnant and poisonous at lower levels, for then scavenger fish could not feed upon the bodies. If oil was to be found, it was necessary that the land must at one time have been under the sea. Much of the North American continent was at one time covered by a vast inland sea, and this seemed to include their own locality.
Many other conditions were necessary to the formation of oil. Certain kinds of rocks must be present. Pockets or traps must be formed by the folding of the earth’s crust, with a layer of shale or clay above so that the oil cannot escape. Ted also learned about salt plugs. These are pillars of salt, perhaps a mile in diameter, which push up through the rocks. Sometimes a mound of earth above the surface will indicate the presence of a salt plug beneath, which suggests the strong possibility of oil. Was Sandy Hill itself such a mound, sitting upon a salt plug beneath? Ted was beginning to think so, or at least that this was the clue others were following up.
To determine whether oil might be present in a promising location, a test well is often sunk to learn whether the formation of rocks below the surface is such that oil is likely. But short of a test well, there are many other methods. A very delicate balance showing variations in gravity will often disclose the presence of a salt plug. Also, explosions of dynamite are sometimes set off, and by measuring the rate of speed with which the shock waves travel through the earth, salt plugs can be located.
The Mystery of Rainbow Gulch Page 10