Jules Verne (31 page)

"Just take note, my friends," he said, "of what we are doing here, so
that you can relate before the magistrate what has passed."

The men came up to the pirogue.

Fragoso undid the belt which encircled the body of Torres underneath the
torn poncho, and feeling his breast-pocket, exclaimed:

"The case!"

A cry of joy escaped from Benito. He stretched forward to seize the
case, to make sure than it contained—

"No!" again interrupted Manoel, whose coolness did not forsake him. "It
is necessary that not the slightest possible doubt should exist in the
mind of the magistrate! It is better that disinterested witnesses should
affirm that this case was really found on the corpse of Torres!"

"You are right," replied Benito.

"My friend," said Manoel to the foreman of the raft, "just feel in the
pocket of the waistcoat."

The foreman obeyed. He drew forth a metal case, with the cover screwed
on, and which seemed to have suffered in no way from its sojourn in the
water.

"The paper! Is the paper still inside?" exclaimed Benito, who could not
contain himself.

"It is for the magistrate to open this case!" answered Manoel. "To him
alone belongs the duty of verifying that the document was found within
it."

"Yes, yes. Again you are right, Manoel," said Benito. "To Manaos, my
friends—to Manaos!"

Benito, Manoel, Fragoso, and the foreman who held the case, immediately
jumped into one of the pirogues, and were starting off, when Fragoso
said:

"And the corpse?"

The pirogue stopped.

In fact, the Indians had already thrown back the body into the water,
and it was drifting away down the river.

"Torres was only a scoundrel," said Benito. "If I had to fight him, it
was God that struck him, and his body ought not to go unburied!"

And so orders were given to the second pirogue to recover the corpse,
and take it to the bank to await its burial.

But at the same moment a flock of birds of prey, which skimmed along the
surface of the stream, pounced on the floating body. They were urubus,
a kind of small vulture, with naked necks and long claws, and black as
crows. In South America they are known as gallinazos, and their voracity
is unparalleled. The body, torn open by their beaks, gave forth the
gases which inflated it, its density increased, it sank down little
by little, and for the last time what remained of Torres disappeared
beneath the waters of the Amazon.

Ten minutes afterward the pirogue arrived at Manaos. Benito and his
companions jumped ashore, and hurried through the streets of the town.
In a few minutes they had reached the dwelling of Judge Jarriuez, and
informed him, through one of his servants, that they wished to see him
immediately.

The judge ordered them to be shown into his study.

There Manoel recounted all that had passed, from the moment when Torres
had been killed until the moment when the case had been found on his
corpse, and taken from his breast-pocket by the foreman.

Although this recital was of a nature to corroborate all that Joam
Dacosta had said on the subject of Torres, and of the bargain which he
had endeavored to make, Judge Jarriquez could not restrain a smile of
incredulity.

"There is the case, sir," said Manoel. "For not a single instant has
it been in our hands, and the man who gives it to you is he who took it
from the body of Torres."

The magistrate took the case and examined it with care, turning it over
and over as though it were made of some precious material. Then he shook
it, and a few coins inside sounded with a metallic ring. Did not, then,
the case contain the document which had been so much sought after—the
document written in the very hand of the true author of the crime of
Tijuco, and which Torres had wished to sell at such an ignoble price
to Joam Dacosta? Was this material proof of the convict's innocence
irrevocably lost?

We can easily imagine the violent agitation which had seized upon the
spectators of this scene. Benito could scarcely utter a word, he felt
his heart ready to burst. "Open it, sir! open the case!" he at last
exclaimed, in a broken voice.

Judge Jarriquez began to unscrew the lid; then, when the cover was
removed, he turned up the case, and from it a few pieces of gold dropped
out and rolled on the table.

"But the paper! the paper!" again gasped Benito, who clutched hold of
the table to save himself from falling.

The magistrate put his fingers into the case and drew out, not without
difficulty, a faded paper, folded with care, and which the water did not
seem to have even touched.

"The document! that is the document!" shouted Fragoso; "that is the very
paper I saw in the hands of Torres!"

Judge Jarriquez unfolded the paper and cast his eyes over it, and then
he turned it over so as to examine it on the back and the front, which
were both covered with writing. "A document it really is!" said he;
"there is no doubt of that. It is indeed a document!"

"Yes," replied Benito; "and that is the document which proves my
father's innocence!"

"I do not know that," replied Judge Jarriquez; "and I am much afraid it
will be very difficult to know it."

"Why?" exclaimed Benito, who became pale as death.

"Because this document is a cryptogram, and—"

"Well?"

"We have not got the key!"

THIS WAS a contingency which neither Joam Dacosta nor his people could
have anticipated. In fact, as those who have not forgotten the first
scene in this story are aware, the document was written in a disguised
form in one of the numerous systems used in cryptography.

But in which of them?

To discover this would require all the ingenuity of which the human
brain was capable.

Before dismissing Benito and his companions, Judge Jarriquez had an
exact copy made of the document, and, keeping the original, handed it
over to them after due comparison, so that they could communicate with
the prisoner.

Then, making an appointment for the morrow, they retired, and not
wishing to lose an instant in seeing Joam Dacosta, they hastened on to
the prison, and there, in a short interview, informed him of all that
had passed.

Joam Dacosta took the document and carefully examined it. Shaking
his head, he handed it back to his son. "Perhaps," he said, "there is
therein written the proof I shall never be able to produce. But if that
proof escapes me, if the whole tenor of my life does not plead for me,
I have nothing more to expect from the justice of men, and my fate is in
the hands of God!"

And all felt it to be so. If the document remained indecipherable, the
position of the convict was a desperate one.

"We shall find it, father!" exclaimed Benito. "There never was
a document of this sort yet which could stand examination. Have
confidence—yes, confidence! Heaven has, so to speak, miraculously
given us the paper which vindicates you, and, after guiding our hands to
recover it, it will not refuse to direct our brains to unravel it."

Joam Dacosta shook hands with Benito and Manoel, and then the three
young men, much agitated, retired to the jangada, where Yaquita was
awaiting them.

Yaquita was soon informed of what had happened since the evening—the
reappearance of the body of Torres, the discovery of the document, and
the strange form under which the real culprit, the companion of the
adventurer, had thought proper to write his confession—doubtless, so
that it should not compromise him if it fell into strange hands.

Naturally, Lina was informed of this unexpected complication, and of the
discovery made by Fragoso that Torres was an old captain of the woods
belonging to the gang who were employed about the mouths of the Madeira.

"But under what circumstances did you meet him?" asked the young
mulatto.

"It was during one of my runs across the province of Amazones," replied
Fragoso, "when I was going from village to village, working at my
trade."

"And the scar?"

"What happened was this: One day I arrived at the mission of Aranas
at the moment that Torres, whom I had never before seen, had picked
a quarrel with one of his comrades—and a bad lot they are!—and this
quarrel ended with a stab from a knife, which entered the arm of the
captain of the woods. There was no doctor there, and so I took charge of
the wound, and that is how I made his acquaintance."

"What does it matter after all," replied the young girl, "that we know
what Torres had been? He was not the author of the crime, and it does
not help us in the least."

"No, it does not," answered Fragoso; "for we shall end by reading the
document, and then the innocence of Joam Dacosta will be palpable to the
eyes of all."

This was likewise the hope of Yaquita, of Benito, of Manoel, and of
Minha, and, shut up in the house, they passed long hours in endeavoring
to decipher the writing.

But if it was their hope—and there is no need to insist on that
point—it was none the less that of Judge Jarriquez.

After having drawn up his report at the end of his examination
establishing the identity of Joam Dacosta, the magistrate had sent it
off to headquarters, and therewith he thought he had finished with the
affair so far as he was concerned. It could not well be otherwise.

On the discovery of the document, Jarriquez suddenly found himself face
to face with the study of which he was a master. He, the seeker after
numerical combinations, the solver of amusing problems, the answerer of
charades, rebuses, logogryphs, and such things, was at last in his true
element.

At the thought that the document might perhaps contain the justification
of Joam Dacosta, he felt all the instinct of the analyst aroused. Here,
before his very eyes, was a cryptogram! And so from that moment he
thought of nothing but how to discover its meaning, and it is scarcely
necessary to say that he made up his mind to work at it continuously,
even if he forgot to eat or to drink.

After the departure of the young people, Judge Jarriquez installed
himself in his study. His door, barred against every one, assured him of
several hours of perfect solitude. His spectacles were on his nose,
his snuff-box on the table. He took a good pinch so as to develop the
finesse and sagacity of his mind. He picked up the document and became
absorbed in meditation, which soon became materialized in the shape of a
monologue. The worthy justice was one of those unreserved men who think
more easily aloud than to himself. "Let us proceed with method," he
said. "No method, no logic; no logic, no success."

Then, taking the document, he ran through it from beginning to end,
without understanding it in the least.

The document contained a hundred lines, which were divided into half a
dozen paragraphs.

"Hum!" said the judge, after a little reflection; "to try every
paragraph, one after the other, would be to lose precious time, and be
of no use. I had better select one of these paragraphs, and take the one
which is likely to prove the most interesting. Which of them would do
this better than the last, where the recital of the whole affair is
probably summed up? Proper names might put me on the track, among others
that of Joam Dacosta; and if he had anything to do with this document,
his name will evidently not be absent from its concluding paragraph."

The magistrate's reasoning was logical, and he was decidedly right in
bringing all his resources to bear in the first place on the gist of the
cryptogram as contained in its last paragraph.

Here is the paragraph, for it is necessary to again bring it before the
eyes of the reader so as to show how an analyst set to work to discover
its meaning.

"P h y j s l y d d q f d z x g a s g z z q q e h x g k f n d r x u j u
g I o c y t d x v k s b x h h u y p o h d v y r y m h u h p u y d k j o
x p h e t o z l s l e t n p m v f f o v p d p a j x h y y n o j y g g a
y m e q y n f u q l n m v l y f g s u z m q I z t l b q q y u g s q e u
b v n r c r e d g r u z b l r m x y u h q h p z d r r g c r o h e p q x
u f I v v r p l p h o n t h v d d q f h q s n t z h h h n f e p m q k y
u u e x k t o g z g k y u u m f v I j d q d p z j q s y k r p l x h x q
r y m v k l o h h h o t o z v d k s p p s u v j h d."

At the outset, Judge Jarrizuez noticed that the lines of the document
were not divided either into words or phrases, and that there was a
complete absence of punctuation. This fact could but render the reading
of the document more difficult.

"Let us see, however," he said, "if there is not some assemblage of
letters which appears to form a word—I mean a pronounceable word,
whose number of consonants is in proportion to its vowels. And at the
beginning I see the word
phy;
further on the word
gas
. Halloo!
ujugi
. Does that mean the African town on the banks of Tanganyika?
What has that got to do with all this? Further on here is the word
ypo
. Is it Greek, then? Close by here is
rym
and
puy,
and
jox,
and
phetoz,
and
jyggay,
and
mv,
and
qruz
. And before that we
have got
red
and
let
. That is good! those are two English words.
Then
ohe—syk;
then
rym
once more, and then the word
oto."

Judge Jarriquez let the paper drop, and thought for a few minutes.

"All the words I see in this thing seem queer!" he said. "In fact, there
is nothing to give a clue to their origin. Some look like Greek, some
like Dutch; some have an English twist, and some look like nothing at
all! To say nothing of these series of consonants which are not wanted
in any human pronunciation. Most assuredly it will not be very easy to
find the key to this cryptogram."