All Wednesday afternoon, he turned from one futile experiment to another, most of them being variants of schemes already tried. It annoyed him that he seemed unable to bring his attention to a sharp focus. Now he would sit at his desk for an hour, sharpening pencils and gazing glassily at the mocking script. Now he would fling himself across his bed and, supporting himself on an aching elbow, set down columns of letters in every manner of eccentric sequence. Oblivious of the passing time, his own discomfort, his need of exercise, he continued to lay out diagrams and tear up paper. Night came down and he turned on the lights. Midnight found him very weary, his brain operating mechanically, sluggishly. He tapped his teeth with his pencil, and went woolgathering in spite of himself. He even made a brief mental excursion on foot along the highway to the north of Windymere and assisted a motorist in distress. Recovering himself, impatiently, he pursued his endless diagrams.
Then a fresh idea occurred to him. Here was something he had not yet tried. He wrote the first few words of the unintelligible script in a running line, utterly disregarding the spaces between them. (It had long been his practice to reproduce the letters in capitals, thinking this might help to simplify the words.)
Now he broke in two what was obviously the first sentence, at the point where the Greek letter “μ” indicated a half-stop, and set down the remainder of that obvious division immediately below it:
| R | A | E | I | O | S | D | R | O | M | F | I | N | ||||||||||||
| E | D | R | C | N | I | E | Y | U | Y | R | E | D |
Moved by sheer caprice, he wrote the lines again, the second division lacking one space of meeting the left margin:
| R | A | E | I | O | S | D | R | O | M | F | I | N | |||||||||||||
| E | D | R | C | N | I | E | Y | U | Y | R | E | D |
For full five minutes he stared at this combination until the lines blurred and blended. Of a sudden, his heart speeded up. His pencil shook as he rapidly rewrote the letters, mortising the lines:
readericonsideryoumyfriend
“I have it!”
He shouted, aloud; laughed, ecstatically, half hysterically. How ridiculously simple it was—now that he had cracked it open. Within five minutes of feverish copying and mortising, he had decoded the brief message of the first page:
Reader I consider you my friend and commend your perseverance having achieved the ability to read this book you have also the right to possess it my reasons for doing this in cipher will be made plain as you proceed
With the long strain relaxed, Bobby awoke to the fact that he was wolfishly hungry. He dressed for the street, a broad grin of self-satisfaction on his face. It was good to have conquered something! As he stood before the glass, knotting his scarf, he glanced at the little black book on the table as a gladiator might have regarded a recumbent antagonist.
Stepping out into a stinging sleet-storm, invigorated by its tonic thrust, he squared his shoulders, lengthened his stride, took deep inhalations, laughed joyously, sang the Marseillaise, and marched to it, swinging his long arms with a triumphant swagger.
There was a little chophouse only a block south of the Michigan Central station where one Tony held forth all night. Tony was typical of the occasional small shopkeeper, erudite barber, philosophical cobbler, or picturesque restaurateur to be found in every college town, by whose eccentricities, combined with a sincere interest in varsity athletics and the institution at large, they contrive to achieve local fame.
Many a full professor at the State University would have been happy and lucky had he been able to call as many undergraduates by their names as Tony. The turnover in population in a college town being bewilderingly rapid, Tony’s eleven years’ residence in Ann Arbor had made him a fixture, an institution. It was as if he had been there since the sixth day of creation.
He was reputed to be quite well to do, in spite of the fact that he extended credit and made unsecured loans to students with a naive faith that would have closed a bank in forty-eight hours.
On the cigar-case lay open a cheap daybook. Attached to it, by a cotton string, was a pencil. If a student came into Tony’s place without funds, he ordered what he liked and upon leaving wrote his name and the amount of his indebtedness in the book. It was not necessary to establish one’s credit. One wrote in the book. When one got around to it, one paid off the score, leafed back through the book, located and personally deleted the item. Tony unemotionally accepted the payment. His failure to smile his thanks over the liquidation of the debt was in itself a pretty compliment. Having known it would be paid, there was no occasion for breaking out into rapture.
Tony himself came on duty at six in the evening and stayed the night. Nobody ever saw him at his place of business in the daytime, capable assistants being in charge through the breakfast and luncheon hours.
“Tony, how come you work only at night?” he was frequently asked by his clients, as he plunked platters of ham and eggs on a bare wooden table.
“You rather I not be here at night—eh?” Tony would inquire, grinning, quite aware that in the noisy protest which this rejoinder would evoke, their original inquiry would be forgotten.
Periodically young reporters on The Michigan Daily, hopeful of developing what they suspected was an unusual flair for feature writing, would engage Tony in conversation about his business; how much did he lose annually through bad loans and loose credit; why did he work only at night when business was unimportant; and sundry queries phrased in the best conventional manner of journalistic impertinence. But no story had ever appeared on this subject, Tony invariably taking refuge, when hard pressed, behind
