But first, I need to know if there's an inn around here called Elrige's."

We returned to the old hall and questioned the servants. None of them had heard of such a place. Then the stable boy mentioned that a farmer named Elrige lived a few miles away in the direction of East Ruston.

Holmes thought for a moment, a curious smile on his face. "Is it a remote farm?" he asked.

"Yes, sir, very remote."

"Then perhaps they haven't heard about what happened here last night... Saddle a horse, my lad. I want you to take a note to Elrige's farm."

From his pocket, Holmes took out the various slips of paper containing the dancing men. He sat down at a desk, placing them in front of him, and began writing a message. When he finished, he put it in an envelope. I noticed that his handwriting, usually precise, was now messy and uneven. Holmes gave the letter to the boy, instructing him to deliver it to a Mr. Abe Slaney at Elrige's Farm and not to answer any questions the man might ask.

After the boy left, Holmes turned to the inspector. "I suggest you call for armed backup. If my calculations are correct, you'll soon have a particularly dangerous suspect on your hands." Then he addressed the servants: "If a visitor asks for Mrs. Cubitt, don't tell him anything about her condition. Instead, show him to the drawing room."

The doctor left to attend to his patients, and the constable went to telegraph the Norwich Constabulary for a wagon and two armed policemen. Only Holmes, the inspector, and I remained. Holmes led us into the drawing room. "All we can do now is wait for events to unfold, gentlemen," he said.

"Perhaps this is a good time for you to explain how you know so much about this case," suggested Inspector Martin.

"Of course," said Holmes, and he quickly outlined all that had happened since Mr. Cubitt's first visit to Baker Street. Then he invited us to join him at a table where he spread out the "dancing men" papers and began to explain how he had deciphered their secrets.

"I'm familiar with most forms of coded writing," said Holmes, "but this one was entirely new to me. The inventor of this code clearly wanted to hide the fact that it's a code and made it look like a child's sketch. However, I quickly realized that each dancing man represented a letter of the alphabet.

"The first message was too short to learn much from, but I noticed that one symbol appeared four times in just 15 letters. I guessed this symbol probably stood for E, the most common letter in English. I also noticed that some figures were holding flags, which I presumed represented breaks between words.

"Hilton soon brought me more samples. One of these was only five letters long and without a flag, so it had to be a single word: 'Never.' That gave me the symbols for N, V, and R.

"Another thought occurred to me. If these messages were from someone close to Mrs. Cubitt, they probably addressed her by her first name, Elsie. So any five-letter words starting and ending with E could be her name. I quickly found examples: 'Elsie' and 'Eagle.' That's how I deduced the symbols for L, S, and I.

"Next, I looked at the word before 'Elsie.' It was four letters and ended in E. I thought if the sender was appealing to Elsie, then surely that word had to be 'Come.' That gave me C, O, and M.

"With several letters decoded, I revisited the first message. This is what I got: 'Come here Slaney.'

"That's the gist of it," Holmes concluded.

“The first letter, I realized, had to be A, which was helpful since it appears three times in this sentence. I further guessed that the missing letter in the second word was H, giving me: AM HERE A-E SLANE-. From there, it was easy to fill in the blanks and arrive at AM HERE ABE SLANEY.

“I had enough letters to confidently move onto the second message, which I decoded as A- ELRI-ES. This made sense when you added T and G for the missing letters, giving us AT ELRIGES, which I assumed to be a local inn.”

Inspector Martin and I listened with great interest to this explanation of how my friend deciphered the "dancing men" code.

“What did you do next, sir?” asked the inspector.

“I suspected this Abe Slaney to be an American, since Abe is an American name and a letter from America had started all the trouble. I also supposed that something criminal was going on, or else why couldn’t Mrs. Cubitt tell her husband about it? So I cabled my friend Wilson Hargreave of the New York Police and asked if the name Abe Slaney meant anything to him. He replied that he was the most dangerous crook in Chicago.

“That same evening, Hilton Cubitt sent me the final communication from Slaney. Working with the letters I had, I translated it as ELSIE -RE-ARE TO MEET THY GO-. By adding a P and a D, I was able to complete the message and understand its terrifying meaning. Slaney had moved from persuasion to threats, and from what I know of Chicago criminals, they waste no time in putting words into action. That's why I decided to come to Norfolk immediately with Dr. Watson. Sadly, we arrived too late.”

“I commend you on your deductions, sir,” said Inspector Martin. “But if this Mr. Slaney escapes, I'll face serious consequences with my superiors.”

“Don't worry, Inspector,” said Holmes. “He won’t try to escape. In fact, I'm expecting him at any moment.”

We stared at Sherlock Holmes in complete surprise. “Why would he come here?” I asked.

“Because I invited him.”

“But wouldn’t your invitation make him suspicious and want to run away?”

“Not if my calculations are right... In fact, if I’m correct, he's arriving now.”

We peeked out the window and saw a tall, handsome man with a black beard walking toward the front door. Dressed in a flannel suit and Panama hat, he confidently strolled up the driveway as if he owned the place.

The doorbell rang loudly and Holmes said: “Gentlemen, let's hide behind the door. Inspector, keep your handcuffs ready, and let me handle the conversation.”

We followed his instructions and waited quietly for a minute that felt like ten. Then the door opened, and Abe Slaney stepped inside. In an instant, Holmes emerged from the shadows, pointing a pistol at him, while the inspector swiftly handcuffed Slaney.

It happened so fast that Slaney was bewildered before he realized what was happening. He glared at us with blazing black eyes, then burst into bitter laughter.

“Well, gentlemen, this is unexpected,” he drawled in an American accent. “I came here at Mrs. Hilton Cubitt’s request. Don’t tell me she’s part of this. Did she set a trap for me?”

“Mrs. Cubitt is seriously injured and may not survive,” said Holmes.

Slaney let out a harsh cry that echoed through the house. “You’re lying!” he shouted. “It was the Englishman who got hurt, not Elsie. Who would hurt little Elsie? I may have threatened her, God forgive me, but I’d never harm her. Stop with your lies. Tell me she's not hurt!”

“She was found badly wounded by her dead husband’s side.”

Slaney sank onto the sofa, groaning deeply, and covered his face with his manacled hands. He remained silent for five minutes, then raised his head and spoke calmly: “I have nothing to hide from you, gentlemen. I shot the man in self-defense because he shot at me. But if you think I could’ve harmed that woman, then you don’t know her or me. Elsie and I were engaged to be married. The Englishman had no right to interfere. She was promised to me, and I was only claiming what was rightfully mine.”

“She ended her relationship with you when she discovered your true nature,” said Holmes coldly. “She fled from America to escape you. You followed her here and tried to force her to leave the husband she loved. As a result, you caused the death of a good man and pushed his wife to attempt suicide. That's what you've done, Mr. Slaney, and you'll face the consequences before the law.”

“If Elsie dies, I don’t care what happens to me,” said Slaney. Then he noticed the note crumpled in his hand and looked suspicious. “If the lady's that badly hurt, who wrote this note?” He tossed it onto the table.

“I wrote it to bring you here.”

“You? That’s impossible. No one outside The Joint knows the secret of the dancing men.”

“What one person can create, another can decode,” said Holmes. “I brought you here with that message, and a police wagon will soon take you to Norwich. Meanwhile, Mrs. Cubitt is suspected of murdering her husband. The least you can do is clear her name.”

“I’d be happy to,” said Slaney. “As you said, it’s the least I can do.”

Inspector Martin grabbed his notepad and pen as Slaney confessed. “I’ve known Elsie since she was a child,” he began. “There were seven of us in a Chicago gang called The Joint, and Elsie’s dad was the boss. He was a smart man, old Mr. Patrick. He invented that writing, which looked like a kid’s drawing unless you had the key to it.

“Elsie grew to hate the business. She was engaged to me and would have married me if I'd found an honest job. But I wouldn’t do that, so one day she disappeared and went to London. I wrote to her and got no reply, so I came here and left her messages where she would see them. I’ve been here a month now, trying to convince her to come back to me. Yesterday, she finally agreed to meet. She said she’d come down at three o’clock this morning and talk with me through the study window, if I agreed to leave afterward and let her be.

“We met there as planned. She brought money and tried to bribe me to leave. This made me angry. I grabbed her arm and tried to pull her through the window. Then her husband burst in with a gun. I was armed too, and when he shot and missed, I fired almost at the same time, and he fell. Then I fled across the garden as the window slammed shut behind me. I heard nothing more until that boy came with the note, luring me here like a rabbit into your trap.”

While Slaney spoke, a police wagon arrived, and two officers entered.

Inspector Martin stood up. “It’s time to go,” he said to Slaney.

Holmes and I watched from the window as they drove away. Then I picked up Holmes’s note to Slaney. It contained no words, only a line of dancing men.

“It simply means ‘Come here at once,’” said Holmes. “I knew he'd accept the invitation because he couldn’t imagine it coming from anyone but Elsie. It seems, my dear Watson, that the dancing men did some good today when so often they've been the cause of evil.”

He checked his pocket watch. “Looks like we have just enough time to catch the three-forty train and be back at Baker Street for dinner.”

In the end, Abe Slaney avoided the hangman’s noose and was given a jail sentence because Hilton Cubitt fired the first shot. Mrs. Cubitt, fortunately, made a full recovery and has since dedicated herself to helping the poor and managing her husband’s estate.