Across the Spanish Main Part 25

And one of the masked men replied: "No, your excellency; he has not as yet. But we hope that during the next torture he will speak; he is but now only just recovering from the last."

"Continue, then," commanded Alvarez. "But first remove those two boys to their cell, and I charge you, on your lives, to see that they escape not; for of all those whom I have ever wished to have in my power I wanted that one most"--pointing to Roger. "Therefore, keep him safe; keep both of them safe; for I shall require them soon."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.

THE TRANSLATION OF THE CRYPTOGRAM.

In obedience to the commands of Alvarez, two of the black-cloaked men seized Roger, each of them taking him by an arm, and led him back to the cell, whilst two more followed with the unconscious body of poor Harry.

When they arrived in the cell, the men who were carrying Harry's body simply flung it down on the stone table with careless violence, and then, without glancing back, left the apartment, and, closing the door, locked and bolted it again on the outside.

Roger's first thought was for his friend, whose head had been badly cut owing to the force with which he had been flung on the stone table.

He instinctively glanced round the cell, and his eyes fell upon the jug of water, which, with their food, had been placed there during their visit to the torture-chamber. With an exclamation of thankfulness he seized upon the jug, and, stripping off his doublet, tore away the sleeve of his unders.h.i.+rt; then, dipping that in the water, he bound it round the head of his friend over the jagged gash.

The sensation of cold produced by the soaking bandage restored Harry to consciousness, and, heaving a sigh, he opened his eyes; then memory returned, and he gave a great shudder as he remembered the awful scene upon which he had gazed but a short time since. His wandering eye caught sight of Roger's familiar form; he called his friend to him, and Roger a.s.sisted him to his feet. Harry quickly recovered, but said that he felt rather sick and faint after what he had seen, and his head was aching rather badly.

"Oh, Roger, what fiends in human shape are those men!" he exclaimed.

"They cut and slash and burn the living bodies of their fellow-men until they lose all semblance of human beings. Surely some judgment from heaven will some day fall upon them for committing such awful deeds!"

"Ay, doubtless it will; though not, perhaps, in this world," answered Roger. "Now, if we could but find Mr Cavendish, let him know what is going on here, and march up with a hundred or two of our lads from the fleet, we would ourselves visit such a judgment upon them as would leave room for no other. But, Harry, I have somewhat to tell you, dear lad.

After you had fainted at sight of poor de Soto, a man came in, recognised us both, and ordered us to be taken back here, as he would 'require us both in the future'. That man was Alvarez! I see it all now. He suspects de Soto of possessing the cryptogram, and has tortured him to make him confess its whereabouts. De Soto, not having it, cannot say where it is. Now, you and I were on the _Gloria del Mundo_ before she sank. I don't know whether Alvarez saw you, but he did me the honour of desiring to slay me as I lay helpless before he left the s.h.i.+p.

He was frustrated in his humane desire, however; but, knowing that I escaped after all from the _Gloria_, his suspicious mind will almost certainly jump to the conclusion that I have that paper, seeing that de Soto has persistently, and despite the most frightful tortures, evidently denied all knowledge of it. I can see that something of the kind is in his thoughts, because of his stringent commands for us to be 'kept safe', as he will 'require us in the future'. So we know what to look forward to, my friend, if we cannot make our escape. The same sort of torture as that through which poor de Soto has just pa.s.sed will be ours, G.o.d help us! Now, what counsel have you to offer under the circ.u.mstances?"

"Well, my friend," answered Harry, "I should say that our best plan would be to endeavour to translate that cryptogram, commit its meaning to memory, and then destroy the paper. Then, if we are asked for it, we can say that we have it not, and allow them to search us as proof that what we say is true.

"Also, if Alvarez finds that the paper is really not in our hands, and if, in addition to that, we tell him that we know not where it is, perhaps we may avoid being tortured to make us confess its hiding-place; for I am sure that poor de Soto was tortured for no other reason than that Alvarez thought he had the cryptogram, and wished to make him confess where it is. That's my advice to you, Roger; and the sooner we set about trying to translate that cipher the sooner we shall finish and be able to destroy it, and the safer we shall be. How fortunate it is that they have not decided to bore out that spy-hole again! We shall now be able to work at the paper without danger of being seen."

"Let us, then, start on the matter at once," replied Roger, "and, as our food has only recently been brought to us, we shall not be interrupted again for some hours, unless, of course, Alvarez should send for us; but I do not think he will want to question us to-day; he has not yet finished with that poor wretch de Soto. Now, Harry, just rip up the seam of my jerkin, and get that paper out, and let us start the business at once."

Harry took out his knife, which, strangely enough, he had been permitted to retain, and, carefully cutting the st.i.tches, removed the paper, unfolded it, and laid it open upon the stone table. Then both lads leant over the doc.u.ment and concentrated all their energies on the task before them.

"First of all," said Roger, "what language is it most likely to be written in? Jose Leirya was himself a Spaniard, it is true; but from what I could gather from that man William Evans, about whom I told you, his crew was invariably made up for the most part of Englishmen; so it is reasonable to a.s.sume that English would be the language he would have to employ on board his s.h.i.+p. He had been sailing the high seas as a pirate for a good many years; so one would imagine that at the time when he wrote that cipher he would know probably more English than Spanish.

What, therefore, more natural than that he should write his secret in English? At any rate, I think we should not be far wrong in a.s.suming that it is written in English; and so we will take it for granted that such is the case. And if we find that we are wrong, we will try some other language--say Spanish.

"But the language is not all-important; it is the finding what signs or letters those figures stand for that will be the difficulty. Now let us have a look at the paper. There is the first line of figures.

"1581. 2227 1819 1919 2622 1820 1335 1138 1918.

"Let us take that first, and see what we can make of it. I should say that the first number, standing, as it is, by itself, is the year in which it was written, that is to say, the year 1581. Now, you observe that these figures are all in groups of four. We will say that each figure represents a letter, which is not very likely, as not all the words could possibly consist of four letters each; but they might be the initial letters of certain words, giving sufficient of the word to enable one to guess the rest. Now there are 26 letters in the alphabet.

Taking A as being 1, B as 2, C as 3, and so on up to Z as 26, let us apply this to the cipher.

"By doing this with the first group, we get B B B G, or, if we take the figures in groups of two--V--something else; but there is no letter corresponding to the number 27, so that hypothesis fails. Again, B B B G is no whole word, nor even the beginning of one; evidently, therefore, we are not right in that surmise.

"Now let us add together the first and second pair of figures in every group; for it is only by testing every possible combination of these exasperating figures that we shall arrive at their meaning. By doing this we get 4 and 9, which correspond to D and I. Now that looks more promising, so let us take the next group 1819. These, added, make 9 and 10, corresponding to I and J. This gives us D I I J. That again, Harry, does not seem to mean very much, does it?"

"No," replied Harry, "it certainly does not. Still, let us go on; we may make something out of it yet. The next group is 1919, which makes 10 and 10 or J J; and the next group makes 8 and 4, or H and D.

"Now let us put all these together. By doing so, we get D I I J J H D, which certainly does not look like any language. We can make no words out of those letters, whichever way we arrange them, so it seems that we are wrong again in our method."

"Never mind, my friend," said Roger, "let us still go on; it will not do to be discouraged so soon. There certainly is some translation to that ma.s.s of figures, I feel certain, and I am determined to find it. Now, how can we go about it next? I have it! Let us take each group as representing one letter instead of two or four, as we did before. What shall we then get?

"We now have 13, 19, 20, 12, 11, 12, 13, 19 for our first line, representing, in letters, M S T L K L M S.

"This, again, conveys no meaning; nor can any words be formed whichever way we arrange the letters.

"Now, instead of adding each figure separately, let us add each set of two, that is, 22 and 27 and 18 and 19, then 19 and 19, and so on, and see what we get then."

"But," objected Harry, "if we do that, we shall get numbers which have no corresponding letters. I mean that by doing as you suggest we should have 49, 37, 38, and our numbers corresponding to letters only go up as far as 26, which stands for Z, so that method cannot be right. It seems to me that this thing is beyond us, Roger; I do not see what we can make of such an awful jumble of figures."

"Gently, my lad, gently," remonstrated Roger, "we will not give it up; we may as well be worrying over this cryptogram as doing nothing, and better, because it helps to pa.s.s the time, and keeps our thoughts from-- from--other things," he ended rather lamely.

For a few moments they remained silent and cogitating. Do what they would to distract their minds from dwelling upon that ghastly scene in the torture-chamber, the picture was constantly intruding itself upon their imaginations; nor could they forget the ominous words of Alvarez when he instructed the guard to keep them safely, as he would "require them in the future."

But, after some little time spent in this dreary form of reverie, Roger started up once more.

"Come, Harry," said he, "it is of no use for us to give way to these miserable forebodings; let us get back to the cipher again. It will keep us from thinking; and, besides, we may not have another such favourable opportunity in the future."

Harry did not reply, but dismissed his gloomy thoughts, though evidently with an effort, and once again the two leant over their precious paper and cudgelled their brains in the effort to find the proper translation.

"Now," resumed Roger, "it seems to me that we may possibly be on the correct track after all with our last grouping of the figures; that is to say, adding the first two and last two figures in each group to one another, and getting a certain number. It looks to me more likely than any of the other methods we tried."

"I confess that I am unable to see it," answered Harry. "We have already ascertained that by that method we get, first of all, the numbers 49, 37, and 38, and, as I remarked, we have no letters corresponding to those numbers."

"No, I agree with you there," replied Roger. "But how are we to know that Jose selected the number 1 for his letter A, 2 for the letter B, and so on? It is not very likely that he would, as that method of procedure would make the solving of the cipher a fairly easy matter, and we should have translated it by now. It is much more likely that he took some other number for his letter A, say 15, or 40, or any number rather than 1."

Harry retorted: "Well, in that case we are just as far off the solution as at first, for how can we possibly tell, except by experiment, what numbers correspond to the right letters? And it would take us weeks to discover it by that method."

"I agree with you that we certainly should be a very considerable time in arriving at the solution if we tried to do it simply by experiment,"

said Roger. "But I do not propose to set about it in that way. Now think, Harry, what letter occurs most frequently in the English tongue."

"Well," replied his friend, "I have never given any thought to the matter, so I couldn't say immediately; but I should say that the letter A occurs as often as any."

"It certainly does often occur, as you say," agreed Roger; "but the letter E occurs more often than any other letter, and, knowing that, I am going to look for the number that occurs most often in the cipher, and I feel sure that that number will be found to correspond to the letter E, provided always, of course, that this cryptogram is written in English."

"Bravo, Roger," shouted Harry; "well thought of! Now, I should never have hit upon that method if I had been worrying at this thing for ever."

"S-s-sh--!" Roger whispered. "Be quiet, man; do you want to bring those spies and jailers upon us? For you a.s.suredly will, if you make much of that row."

"I am sorry," said Harry. "For the moment I had forgotten where we were, and I felt so sure that you had hit upon the right method of translating the cipher that I shouted without thinking."

Roger interrupted his friend: "Do not speak for a few moments. Even then I thought I caught the sound of some person outside the door; I pray Heaven that they may not come into the cell!"

The two listened most intently for some minutes, with their ears pressed up against the wall and door, but caught no sound from outside. So, after waiting a little time longer, to make perfectly certain, they both returned to the task in hand.

"Now let us go on where we left off just now," Harry suggested. "You say that we want to find out the number that occurs most often in the cryptogram, and allow that to represent E."