This was done, and it turned out that the letter could be read in three hundred and eighteen different ways.
The first five variants were as follows: "The roach from Bakersville arrived in one piece, but the bedpan blew a fuse"; "Roll the locomotive's aunt in cutlets"; "Now the butter can't be wed, 'cause the nightcap's nailed"; "He who has had, has been, but he who hasn't been, has been had"; and "From strawberries under torture one may extract all sorts of things." This last variant Professor Crusticus held to be the key to the code and found, after three hundred thousand calculations, that if you added up all the letters of the letter, subtracted the parallax of the sun plus the annual production of umbrellas, and then took the cube root of the remainder, you came up with a single word, "Crusafix." In the telephone book there was a citizen named Crucifax. Crusticus maintained that this alteration of a few letters was merely to throw them off the track, and Crucifax was arrested.
