Stooping to the Challenge

Challenge 3 in Pincock and Frary's book is trivial compared to the previous two - but I'll record the solution here for completeness.

The message is presented in "Union Route cipher" as follows...

Guard this reveal every great avoided this some cowboy historians straightforward enemy efforts rows the fills turning table need to read their obfuscation that saucy contended for despite just initial you the nonsense up clue first now attacks technique have emptiness

Solution involves the trivial task of re-ordering the words into a 5*7 array (the initial word "guard" indicates the pattern of this re-ordering)...

The message is shown in black, the "null" words are shown bracketed in grey and the filler words (used to pad out the array to completion) are in blue.

Reading the message indicates that we're to look at the first initial of every row to reveal the clue we need - shown here in the red box...

"Stager" is the family name of Anson Stager, influential in the development of the Union Route cypher.

I hope Challenge 4 will have a little more meat on the bone!

...-.- de m0xpd