Most emphatically Captain Murphy could not. That cablegram was
important; it meant a great deal of money and possibly life or death--

Regretfully the consul entered the cab with the captain, drove to the
consulate and delivered the cable-gram to the eager mariner, who swore
when he discovered it was in cipher and not code, for this
necessitated immediate return to the _Narcissus_ in order to obtain
the key to the cipher. He thanked the consul and sent the latter home
in the cab, while he hurried for the harbor front and the nearest boat
landing. He was filled with apprehension, for indeed there was
something radically wrong when his owners cabled him in the secret
cipher of the Blue Star Navigation Company--something the company
had, doubtless, never found occasion to do before. For while each
vessel of the Blue Star fleet had a copy of the A.L. code aboard, with
the cipher key typewritten and pasted on the second fly-leaf, not a
single Blue Star skipper knew why it had been pasted there or why the
company should have gone to the trouble of getting up any one of the
hundreds of secret ciphers possible to be developed from the A. L.
Telegraphic Code. This was a secret that lay locked in the breast of
Mr. Skinner. It is probable, however, that it had occurred to him in
an idle moment that a secret cipher might come in handy some day, and
Mr. Skinner believed in being prepared for emergencies.

The captain bade the launch wait for him at the accommodation ladder,
while he hurried round to his state-room and promptly fell to work on
Mr. Skinner's cipher cablegram. When he had laboriously deciphered it
this is what he read:

"Unaccountably failed note suspicious clause charter. Something
rotten. We are playing square game. Think plot deliver coal German