NOTE From D. Barton Johnson:

 I've been reading PALE FIRE for the first time in many years.  The scene below recounts Gradus' attempt to weasel the King's whereabouts out of  Bretwit, the former Royalist consul in Paris. The following passage gave me pause over two points: the "kikapoo puppet" and the secret sign Zemblan royalists use to identifiy each other. The Kickapoo are an Algonquian tribe whose folk art includes "corn husk dolls" that resemble finger puppets, although they were not so used as far as I can discover. Making them now appears to be a "Indian" pastime for school children. I have reproduced one below. At bottom,  I pass on the ASL representation of the letter "X" that VN so nicely describes.

Both points are small gems but it seems unlikely that the Zemblan Kinbote would have such exotic trivia at his fingertips. Or even that VN would, for that matter. But he did.

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"What!" cried Bretwit in candid surprise. "They know at home that His Majesty has left Zembla?" (I could have spanked the dear man.)

"Indeed, yes," said Gradus kneading his hands, and fairly panting with animal pleasure — a matter of instinct no doubt since the man certainly could not realize intelligently that the ex-consul’s faux pas was nothing less than the first confirmation of the King’s presence abroad: "Indeed," he repeated with a meaningful leer, "and I would be deeply obliged to you if you would recommend me to Mr. X."

At these words a false truth dawned upon Oswin Bretwit and he moaned to himself: Of course! How obtuse of me! He is one of us! The fingers of his left hand involuntarily started to twitch as if he were pulling a kikapoo puppet over it, while his eyes followed intently his interlocutor’s low-class gesture of satisfaction. A Karlist agent, revealing himself to a superior, was expected to make a sign corresponding to the X (for Xavier) in the one-hand alphabet of deaf mutes: the hand held in horizontal position with the index curved rather flaccidly and the rest of the fingers bunched (many have criticized it for looking too droopy; it has now been replaced by a more virile combination). On the several occasions Bretwit had been given it, the manifestation had been preceded for him, during a moment of suspense — rather a gap in the texture of time than an actual delay — by something similar to what physicians call the aura, a strange sensation both tense and vaporous, a hot-cold ineffable exasperation pervading the entire nervous system before a seizure. And on this occasion too Bretwit felt the magic wine rise to his head.

"All right, I am ready. Give me the sign," he avidly said.

Gradus, deciding to risk it, glanced at the hand in Bretwit’s lap: unperceived by its owner, it seemed to be prompting Gradus in a manual whisper. He tried to copy what it was doing its best to convey — mere rudiments of the required sign.

"No, no," said Bretwit with an indulgent smile for the awkward novice. "The other hand, my friend. His Majesty is left-handed, you know."

Gradus tried again — but, like an expelled puppet, the wild little prompter had disappeared. Sheepishly contemplating his five stubby strangers, Gradus went through the motions of an incompetent and half-paralyzed shadowgrapher and finally made an uncertain V-for-Victory sign. Bretwit’s smile began to fade. (From kinbote Commentary to line 286 [p.179])