cipher - The Three Little Pigs are hiding something

As you work through one of your countless puzzle books, you find a sheet of paper inside with a poem on it. Remembering the last time you found something like that, you decide to take a crack at this one, hoping to solve it a bit more quickly...

A Fable

The three little pigs hid a little rhyme,
But it's only a matter of how much time
Until the big bad wolf commits the big bad crime
And blows their whole house down.

“Mark my words, pigs, count on these:
I'll find those hidden rhymes with ease,
I'll find those letters and those ABC's
And split them into threes!”

The big bad wolf said this little rhyme,

And he committed the big bad crime,
And he cooked all three of the pigs with thyme,
Wolfing his bacon down.

Nonsense indeed! But what is the fable hiding?

---

Hint:

Upon closer inspection of the poem, you notice that some words have a faint underline, perhaps hinting at a ciphering method: words, count, rhymes, letters, threes, bacon

Hint 2:

Treat each line as a unit, and ignore the stanza breaks. The number 3 is very important.

Answer

The clue about bacon hints at a Baconian cipher. Zandar suggested that it might be a variant of the Baconian cipher that uses a ternary instead of a binary system. So I started by assigning a pattern to each letter, using the values A, B, C:

AAA  A            BAA  J            CAA  S
AAB  B            BAB  K            CAB  T
AAC  C            BAC  L            CAC  U
ABA  D            BBA  M            CBA  V

ABB  E            BBB  N            CBB  W
ABC  F            BBC  O            CBC  X
ACA  G            BCA  P            CCA  Y
ACB  H            BCB  Q            CCB  Z
ACC  I            BCC  R            CCC  (unassigned)

Then I tried to figure out a way to get a pattern out of the poem. Based on the clue words word, count, and threes, and with the help of the second hint, I counted the words in each line, and assigned each line a letter as follows:

• number of words is divisible by 3: A


• number of words $\div$ 3 leaves a remainder of 1: B



• number of words $\div$ 3 leaves a remainder of 2: C

(as a more mathematical way of looking at it, use 0, 1, 2 instead of A, B, C, and just use (word count $\text{mod}$ 3) to assign a value)

This left me with the following:

          Word                Letter
 Line #   count   Remainder   assigned
 1        8       2           C
 2        9       0           A
 3       10       1           B
 4        6       0           A

 5        7       1           B
 6        7       1           B
 7        7       1           B
 8        5       2           C
 9        8       2           C
10        7       1           B
11       10       1           B
12        4       1           B

This leaves us with four triplets: CAB, ABB, BCC, BBB

If we refer back to our alphabet table, these correspond to the letters

T, E, R, N.

Now if we look at the rhyme scheme of the poem, we get another pattern, based on which words rhyme with each other: AAAB CCCC AAAB.

Splitting that into triplets, we get AAA, BCC, CCA, AAB, which correspond to the letters

A, R, Y, B.

If we do the same thing a third time, this time using the letter count instead of the word count, we end up with the sequence AAAAACBBCBBB.

Splitting that into triplets, we get AAA, AAC, BBC, BBB, which correspond to the letters

A, C, O, N.

Putting these three results together, we get

TERNARYBACON or Ternary bacon, which describes the cipher used in encrypting this.

---

A huge thanks to Zandar who actually solved most of this, and SpiritFryer as well.