Lost Cipher by Michael Oechsle Page B

asked impatiently.
    â€œWell,” she said, “the friend with the key to the code never showed up like Beale promised. Finally, after waiting for years, Morris opened the box. What he found inside was a puzzle that tortured him for the rest of his life.”
    She poked at the fire with a long, charred stick, letting her words hang over the circle of campers for effect. Some of the kids finally urged her on and she continued.
    â€œThree of the papers inside were the codes that Beale had described. Long sets of numbers. But each one had a title to tell what would be revealed if they were decoded—one gave directions to a secret vault in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the second described the treasure it held, and the third listed the names of Beale’s men and where they lived in Virginia, so that the treasure could be given to their families if they never returned. In the other papers, Beale wrote the story of how he and his men had found gold and silver in a hidden canyon at the foot of the Rockies and mined it for close to four years. And how they’d made two separate trips back to Virginia to hide it in the mountains.” She swept her hand across the skyline. “Supposedly, these mountains right here.”
    â€œOr so the story goes.” Aaron stood up to throw another log on the fire. “Remember, you all, it’s just a story.”
    â€œSorry, Aaron,” she replied. “Sometimes even I forget that. So anyway, now Morris was finally seeing what was inside Beale’s secret box. The papers also told him that because he’d been trusted with the box and the treasure, Morris was also supposed to get an equal share.”
    â€œBut everything was in code,” said Alex.
    â€œRight,” she replied. “Without the key, he worked at it for years before he finally figured out one of the three ciphers—the one describing the treasure itself. The key for that one was the Declaration of Independence.”
    â€œMakes sense,” said a girl next to Maggie. “Beale was named after Thomas Jefferson.”
    â€œYeah, but how’d it work?” George asked.
    â€œPretty simple once you have the key. You start by numbering each word of the Declaration. Each of the numbers in the cipher match a word in the Declaration. So, say, the third number in the cipher is fifty-six, you look for the fifty-sixth word in the Declaration. If it started with a J , you plug a J into the cipher. Stick a bunch of letters together, you get words. When Morris did it with the second cipher, it spelled out what was in the treasure.”
    She stopped, working up the suspense until the campers were begging her to tell them what the cipher said.
    â€œOh,” she answered, as if the treasure wasn’t much, “only about two tons of gold and almost six tons of silver. Not to mention some jewels that Beale traded for on his way back to Virginia.”
    â€œJeez! Two tons of gold!” shouted a boy across the fire from Lucas. But he looked puzzled. “How much would that be worth, anyway?”
    â€œDuh, like, millions of bucks,” jeered Zack.
    â€œActually, Zack, more like a hundred million today, and that’s just the gold,” said Maggie. “There’s the silver and the jewels too. Anyway, the cipher said more.” She took a folded sheet of paper from her back pocket and read. “‘The above is securely packed in iron pots with iron covers. The vault is roughly lined with stones and the vessels rest on solid stone and are covered with others.’” She looked up at the campers. “And here’s the most important part: ‘Paper number one’—that’s the first cipher—‘describes the exact locality of the vault so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.’
    â€œSupposedly not far from this camp. Supposedly. ” She folded the paper and slipped it back in her pocket. “Morris died before he could