Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Return of Sherlock Holmes

3. The Adventure of the Dancing Men. (continued)

"Even now I was in considerable difficulty, but a happy thought put me in possession of several other letters. It occurred to me that if these appeals came, as I expected, from someone who had been intimate with the lady in her early life, a combination which contained two E's with three letters between might very well stand for the name `ELSIE.' On examination I found that such a combination formed the termination of the message which was three times repeated. It was certainly some appeal to `Elsie.' In this way I had got my L, S, and I. But what appeal could it be? There were only four letters in the word which preceded `Elsie,' and it ended in E. Surely the word must be `COME.' I tried all other four letters ending in E, but could find none to fit the case. So now I was in possession of C, O, and M, and I was in a position to attack the first message once more, dividing it into words and putting dots for each symbol which was still unknown. So treated it worked out in this fashion:--

.M .ERE ..E SL.NE.

"Now the first letter CAN only be A, which is a most useful discovery, since it occurs no fewer than three times in this short sentence, and the H is also apparent in the second word. Now it becomes:--

AM HERE A.E SLANE.

Or, filling in the obvious vacancies in the name:--

AM HERE ABE SLANEY.

I had so many letters now that I could proceed with considerable confidence to the second message, which worked out in this fashion:--

A. ELRI.ES.

Here I could only make sense by putting T and G for the missing letters, and supposing that the name was that of some house or inn at which the writer was staying."

Inspector Martin and I had listened with the utmost interest to the full and clear account of how my friend had produced results which had led to so complete a command over our difficulties.