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!”
CHAPTER XII. THE DOCUMENT
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.”
The magistrate’s fingers commenced to beat a tattoo on his desk--a kind
of reveille to arouse his dormant faculties.
“Let us see,” he said, “how many letters there are in the paragraph.”
He counted them, pen in hand.
“Two hundred and seventy-six!” he said. “Well, now let us try what
proportion these different letters bear to each other.”
This occupied him for some time. The judge took up the document, and,
with his pen in his hand, he noted each letter in alphabetical order.
In a quarter of an hour he had obtained the following table:
-a- = 3 times
-b- = 4 --
-c- = 3 --
-d- = 16 --
-e- = 9 --
-f- = 10 --
-g- = 13 --
-h- = 23 --
-i- = 4 --
-j- = 8 --
-k- = 9 --
-l- = 9 --
-m- = 9 --
-n- = 9 --
-o- = 12 --
-p- = 16 --
-q- = 16 --
-r- = 12 --
-s- = 10 --
-t- = 8 --
-u- = 17 --
-v- = 13 --
-x- = 12 --
-y- = 19 --
-z- = 12 --
----------------
Total... 276 times.
“Ah, ah!” he exclaimed. “One thing strikes me at once, and that is that
in this paragraph all the letters of the alphabet are not used. That is
very strange. If we take up a book and open it by chance it will be
very seldom that we shall hit upon two hundred and seventy-six letters
without all the signs of the alphabet figuring among them. After all, it
may be chance,” and then he passed to a different train of thought.
“One important point is to see if the vowels and consonants are in their
normal proportion.”
And so he seized his pen, counted up the vowels, and obtained the
following result:
-a- = 3 times
-e- = 9 --
-i- = 4 --
-o- = 12 --
-u- = 17 --
-y- = 19 --
----------------
Total... 276 times.
“And thus there are in this paragraph, after we have done our
subtraction, sixty-four vowels and two hundred and twelve consonants.
Good! that is the normal proportion. That is about a fifth, as in the
alphabet, where there are six vowels among twenty-six letters. It is
possible, therefore, that the document is written in the language of our
country, and that only the signification of each letter is changed. If
it has been modified in regular order, and a -b- is always represented
by an -l,- and -o- by a -v,- a -g- by a -k,- an -u- by an -r,- etc., I
will give up my judgeship if I do not read it. What can I do better than
follow the method of that great analytical genius, Edgar Allan Poe?”
Judge Jarriquez herein alluded to a story by the great American
romancer, which is a masterpiece. Who has not read the “Gold Bug?” In
this novel a cryptogram, composed of ciphers, letters, algebraic signs,
asterisks, full-stops, and commas, is submitted to a truly mathematical
analysis, and is deciphered under extraordinary conditions, which the
admirers of that strange genius can never forget. On the reading of the
American document depended only a treasure, while on that of this
one depended a man’s life. Its solution was consequently all the more
interesting.
The magistrate, who had often read and re-read his “Gold Bug,” was
perfectly acquainted with the steps in the analysis so minutely
described by Edgar Poe, and he resolved to proceed in the same way on
this occasion. In doing so he was certain, as he had said, that if
the value or signification of each letter remained constant, he would,
sooner or later, arrive at the solution of the document.
“What did Edgar Poe do?” he repeated. “First of all he began by finding
out the sign--here there are only letters, let us say the letter--which
was reproduced the oftenest. I see that that is -h,- for it is met with
twenty-three times. This enormous proportion shows, to begin with, that
-h- does not stand for -h,- but, on the contrary, that it represents the
letter which recurs most frequently in our language, for I suppose
the document is written in Portuguese. In English or French it would
certainly be -e,- in Italian it would be -i- or -a,- in Portuguese it
will be -a- or -o-. Now let us say that it signifies -a- or -o.”-
After this was done, the judge found out the letter which recurred most
frequently after -h,- and so on, and he formed the following table:
-h- = 23 times
-y- = 19 --
-u- = 17 --
-d p q- = 16 --
-g v- = 13 --
-o r x z- = 12 --
-f s- = 10 --
-e k l m n- = 9 --
-j t- = 8 --
-b i- = 8 --
-a c- = 8 --
“Now the letter -a- only occurs thrice!” exclaimed the judge, “and it
ought to occur the oftenest. Ah! that clearly proves that the meaning
had been changed. And now, after -a- or -o,- what are the letters which
figure oftenest in our language? Let us see,” and Judge Jarriquez, with
truly remarkable sagacity, which denoted a very observant mind, started
on this new quest. In this he was only imitating the American romancer,
who, great analyst as he was, had, by simple induction, been able to
construct an alphabet corresponding to the signs of the cryptogram and
by means of it to eventually read the pirate’s parchment note with ease.
The magistrate set to work in the same way, and we may affirm that he
was no whit inferior to his illustrious master. Thanks to his previous
work at logogryphs and squares, rectangular arrangements and other
enigmas, which depend only on an arbitrary disposition of the letters,
he was already pretty strong in such mental pastimes. On this
occasion he sought to establish the order in which the letters were
reproduced--vowels first, consonants afterward.
Three hours had elapsed since he began. He had before his eyes an
alphabet which, if his procedure were right, would give him the right
meaning of the letters in the document. He had only to successively
apply the letters of his alphabet to those of his paragraph. But before
making this application some slight emotion seized upon the judge. He
fully experienced the intellectual gratification--much greater than,
perhaps, would be thought--of the man who, after hours of obstinate
endeavor, saw the impatiently sought-for sense of the logogryph coming
into view.
“Now let us try,” he said; “and I shall be very much surprised if I have
not got the solution of the enigma!”
Judge Jarriquez took off his spectacles and wiped the glasses; then he
put them back again and bent over the table. His special alphabet was in
one hand, the cryptogram in the other. He commenced to write under the
first line of the paragraph the true letters, which, according to him,
ought to correspond exactly with each of the cryptographic letters. As
with the first line so did he with the second, and the third, and the
fourth, until he reached the end of the paragraph.
Oddity as he was, he did not stop to see as he wrote if the assemblage
of letters made intelligible words. No; during the first stage his
mind refused all verification of that sort. What he desired was to give
himself the ecstasy of reading it all straight off at once.
And now he had done.
“Let us read!” he exclaimed.
And he read. Good heavens! what cacophony! The lines he had formed with
the letters of his alphabet had no more sense in them that those of
the document! It was another series of letters, and that was all.
They formed no word; they had no value. In short, they were just as
hieroglyphic.
“Confound the thing!” exclaimed Judge Jarriquez.
CHAPTER XIII. IS IT A MATTER OF FIGURES?
IT WAS SEVEN o’clock in the evening. Judge Jarriquez had all the time
been absorbed in working at the puzzle--and was no further advanced--and
had forgotten the time of repast and the time of repose, when there came
a knock at his study door.
It was time. An hour later, and all the cerebral substance of the vexed
magistrate would certainly have evaporated under the intense heat into
which he had worked his head.
At the order to enter--which was given in an impatient tone--the door
opened and Manoel presented himself.
The young doctor had left his friends on board the jangada at work on
the indecipherable document, and had come to see Judge Jarriquez. He was
anxious to know if he had been fortunate in his researches. He had come
to ask if he had at length discovered the system on which the cryptogram
had been written.
The magistrate was not sorry to see Manoel come in. He was in that state
of excitement that solitude was exasperating to him. He wanted some one
to speak to, some one as anxious to penetrate the mystery as he was.
Manoel was just the man.
“Sir,” said Manoel as he entered, “one question! Have you succeeded
better than we have?”
“Sit down first,” exclaimed Judge Jarriquez, who got up and began to
pace the room. “Sit down. If we are both of us standing, you will walk
one way and I shall walk the other, and the room will be too narrow to
hold us.”
Manoel sat down and repeated his question.
“No! I have not had any success!” replied the magistrate; “I do not
think I am any better off. I have got nothing to tell you; but I have
found out a certainty.”
“What is that, sir?”
“That the document is not based on conventional signs, but on what is
known in cryptology as a cipher, that is to say, on a number.”
“Well, sir,” answered Manoel, “cannot a document of that kind always be
read?”
“Yes,” said Jarriquez, “if a letter is invariably represented by the
same letter; if an -a,- for example, is always a -p,- and a -p- is
always an -x;- if not, it cannot.”
“And in this document?”
“In this document the value of the letter changes with the arbitrarily
selected cipher which necessitates it. So a -b- will in one place be
represented by a -k- will later on become a -z,- later on an -u- or an
-n- or an -f,- or any other letter.”
“And then?”
“And then, I am sorry to say, the cryptogram is indecipherable.”
“Indecipherable!” exclaimed Manoel. “No, sir; we shall end by finding
the key of the document on which the man’s life depends.”
Manoel had risen, a prey to the excitement he could not control; the
reply he had received was too hopeless, and he refused to accept it for
good.
At a gesture from the judge, however, he sat down again, and in a calmer
voice asked:
“And in the first place, sir, what makes you think that the basis of
this document is a number, or, as you call it, a cipher?”
“Listen to me, young man,” replied the judge, “and you will be forced to
give in to the evidence.”
The magistrate took the document and put it before the eyes of Manoel
and showed him what he had done.
“I began,” he said, “by treating this document in the proper way, that
is to say, logically, leaving nothing to chance. I applied to it an
alphabet based on the proportion the letters bear to one another
which is usual in our language, and I sought to obtain the meaning by
following the precepts of our immortal analyst, Edgar Poe. Well, what
succeeded with him collapsed with me.”
“Collapsed!” exclaimed Manoel.
“Yes, my dear young man, and I at once saw that success sought in that
fashion was impossible. In truth, a stronger man than I might have been
deceived.”
“But I should like to understand,” said Manoel, “and I do not----”
“Take the document,” continued Judge Jarriquez; “first look at the
disposition of the letters, and read it through.”
Manoel obeyed.
“Do you not see that the combination of several of the letters is very
strange?” asked the magistrate.
“I do not see anything,” said Manoel, after having for perhaps the
hundredth time read through the document.
“Well! study the last paragraph! There you understand the sense of the
whole is bound to be summed up. Do you see anything abnormal?”
“Nothing.”
“There is, however, one thing which absolutely proves that the language
is subject to the laws of number.”
“And that is?”
“That is that you see three -h’s- coming together in two different
places.”
What Jarriquez said was correct, and it was of a nature to attract
attention. The two hundred and fourth, two hundred and fifth, and two
hundred and sixth letters of the paragraph, and the two hundred and
fifty-eight, two hundred and fifty-ninth, and two hundred and sixtieth
letters of the paragraph were consecutive -h’s-. At first this
peculiarity had not struck the magistrate.
“And that proves?” asked Manoel, without divining the deduction that
could be drawn from the combination.
“That simply proves that the basis of the document is a number. It shows
-à priori- that each letter is modified in virtue of the ciphers of the
number and according to the place which it occupies.”
“And why?”
“Because in no language will you find words with three consecutive
repetitions of the letter -h.”-
Manoel was struck with the argument; he thought about it, and, in short,
had no reply to make.
“And had I made the observation sooner,” continued the magistrate, “I
might have spared myself a good deal of trouble and a headache which
extends from my occiput to my sinciput.”
“But, sir,” asked Manoel, who felt the little hope vanishing on which he
had hitherto rested, “what do you mean by a cipher?”
“Tell me a number.”
“Any number you like.”
“Give me an example and you will understand the explanation better.”
Judge Jarriquez sat down at the table, took up a sheet of paper and a
pencil, and said:
“Now, Mr. Manoel, let us choose a sentence by chance, the first that
comes; for instance:
-Judge Jarriquez has an ingenious mind.-
I write this phrase so as to space the letters different and I get:
-Judgejarriquezhasaningeniousmind.-
“That done,” said the magistrate, to whom the phrase seemed to contain
a proposition beyond dispute, looking Manoel straight in the face,
“suppose I take a number by chance, so as to give a cryptographic form
to this natural succession of words; suppose now this word is composed
of three ciphers, and let these ciphers be 2, 3, and 4. Now on the line
below I put the number 234, and repeat it as many times as are necessary
to get to the end of the phrase, and so that every cipher comes
underneath a letter. This is what we get:
-J u d g e j a r r I q u e z h a s a n I n g e n I o u s m I n d- 2 3 4
2 3 4 2 3 4 2 3 4 2 3 4 2 3 4 2 3 4 2 3 4 2 3 4 2 3 4 2 3 4 And now,
Mr. Manoel, replacing each letter by the letter in advance of it in
alphabetical order according to the value of the cipher, we get:
-j- + 2 = -l-
-u- + 3 = -x-
-d- + 4 = -h-
-g- + 2 = -i-
-e- + 3 = -h-
-j- + 4 = -n-
-a- + 2 = -c-
-r- + 3 = -u-
-r- + 4 = -v-
-i- + 2 = -k-
-q- + 3 = -t-
-u- + 4 = -y-
-e- + 2 = -g-
-a- + 3 = -c-
-h- + 4 = -t-
-a- + 2 = -c-
-s- + 3 = -v-
-a- + 4 = -e-
-n- + 2 = -p-
-i- + 3 = -l-
-n- + 4 = -r-
-g- + 2 = -i-
-e- + 3 = -h-
-n- + 4 = -r-
-i- + 2 = -k-
-o- + 3 = -r-
-u- + 4 = -y-
-s- + 2 = -u- and so on.
“If, on account of the value of the ciphers which compose the number
I come to the end of the alphabet without having enough complementary
letters to deduct, I begin again at the beginning. That is what happens
at the end of my name when the -z- is replaced by the 3. As after -z-
the alphabet has no more letters, I commence to count from -a,- and
so get the -c-. That done, when I get to the end of this cryptographic
system, made up of the 234--which was arbitrarily selected, do not
forget!--the phrase which you recognize above is replaced by
-lxhihncuvktygclveplrihrkryupmpg.-
“And now, young man, just look at it, and do you not think it is very
much like what is in the document? Well, what is the consequence? Why,
that the signification of the letters depends on a cipher which chance
puts beneath them, and the cryptographic letter which answers to a
true one is not always the same. So in this phrase the first -j- is
represented by an -l,- the second by an -n;- the first -e- by an -h,-
the second b a -g,- the third by an -h;- the first -d- is represented by
an -h,- the last by a -g;- the first -u- by an -x,- the last by a -y;-
the first and second -a’s- by a -c,- the last by an -e;- and in my own
name one -r- is represented by a -u,- the other by a -v.- and so on. Now
do you see that if you do not know the cipher 234 you will never be able
to read the lines, and consequently if we do not know the number of the
document it remains undecipherable.”
On hearing the magistrate reason with such careful logic, Manoel was at
first overwhelmed, but, raising his head, he exclaimed:
“No, sir, I will not renounce the hope of finding the number!”
“We might have done so,” answered Judge Jarriquez, “if the lines of the
document had been divided into words.”
“And why?”
“For this reason, young man. I think we can assume that in the last
paragraph all that is written in these earlier paragraphs is summed up.
Now I am convinced that in it will be found the name of Joam Dacosta.
Well, if the lines had been divided into words, in trying the words one
after the other--I mean the words composed of seven letters, as the name
of Dacosta is--it would not have been impossible to evolve the number
which is the key of the document.”
“Will you explain to me how you ought to proceed to do that, sir?” asked
Manoel, who probably caught a glimpse of one more hope.
“Nothing can be more simple,” answered the judge. “Let us take, for
example, one of the words in the sentence we have just written--my
name, if you like. It is represented in the cryptogram by this queer
succession of letters, -ncuvktygc-. Well, arranging these letters in a
column, one under the other, and then placing against them the letters
of my name and deducting one from the other the numbers of their places
in alphabetical order, I see the following result:
Between -n- and -j- we have 4 letters
-- -c- -- -a- -- 2 --
-- -u- -- -r- -- 3 --
-- -v- -- -r- -- 4 --
-- -k- -- -i- -- 2 --
-- -t- -- -q- -- 3 --
-- -y- -- -u- -- 4 --
-- -g- -- -e- -- 2 --
-- -c- -- -z- -- 3 --
“Now what is the column of ciphers made up of that we have got by this
simple operation? Look here! 423 423 423, that is to say, of repetitions
of the numbers 423, or 234, or 342.”
“Yes, that is it!” answered Manoel.
“You understand, then, by this means, that in calculating the true
letter from the false, instead of the false from the true, I have been
able to discover the number with ease; and the number I was in search of
is really the 234 which I took as the key of my cryptogram.”
“Well, sir!” exclaimed Manoel, “if that is so, the name of Dacosta is in
the last paragraph; and taking successively each letter of those lines
for the first of the seven letters which compose his name, we ought to
get----”
“That would be impossible,” interrupted the judge, “except on one
condition.”
“What is that?”
“That the first cipher of the number should happen to be the first
letter of the word Dacosta, and I think you will agree with me that that
is not probable.”
“Quite so!” sighed Manoel, who, with this improbability, saw the last
chance vanish.
“And so we must trust to chance alone,” continued Jarriquez, who shook
his head, “and chance does not often do much in things of this sort.”
“But still,” said Manoel, “chance might give us this number.”
“This number,” exclaimed the magistrate--“this number? But how many
ciphers is it composed of? Of two, or three, or four, or nine, or ten?
Is it made of different ciphers only or of ciphers in different order
many times repeated? Do you not know, young man, that with the ordinary
ten ciphers, using all at a time, but without any repetition, you
can make three million two hundred and sixty-eight thousand and eight
hundred different numbers, and that if you use the same cipher more than
once in the number, these millions of combinations will be enormously
increased! And do you not know that if we employ every one of the five
hundred and twenty-five thousand and six hundred minutes of which the
year is composed to try at each of these numbers, it would take you six
years, and that you would want three centuries if each operation took
you an hour? No! You ask the impossible!”
“Impossible, sir?” answered Manoel. “An innocent man has been branded
as guilty, and Joam Dacosta is to lose his life and his honor while you
hold in your hands the material proof of his innocence! That is what is
impossible!”
“Ah! young man!” exclaimed Jarriquez, “who told you, after all, that
Torres did not tell a lie? Who told you that he really did have in his
hands a document written by the author of the crime? that this paper was
the document, and that this document refers to Joam Dacosta?”
“Who told me so?” repeated Manoel, and his face was hidden in his hands.
In fact, nothing could prove for certain that the document had anything
to do with the affair in the diamond province. There was, in fact,
nothing to show that it was not utterly devoid of meaning, and that it
had been imagined by Torres himself, who was as capable of selling a
false thing as a true one!
“It does not matter, Manoel,” continued the judge, rising; “it does not
matter! Whatever it may be to which the document refers, I have not
yet given up discovering the cipher. After all, it is worth more than a
logogryph or a rebus!”
At these words Manoel rose, shook hands with the magistrate, and
returned to the jangada, feeling more hopeless when he went back than
when he set out.
CHAPTER XIV. CHANCE!
A COMPLETE change took place in public opinion on the subject of Joam
Dacosta. To anger succeeded pity. The population no longer thronged to
the prison of Manaos to roar out cries of death to the prisoner. On
the contrary, the most forward of them in accusing him of being the
principal author of the crime of Tijuco now averred that he was not
guilty, and demanded his immediate restoration to liberty. Thus it
always is with the mob--from one extreme they run to the other. But the
change was intelligible.
The events which had happened during the last few days--the struggle
between Benito and Torres; the search for the corpse, which had
reappeared under such extraordinary circumstances; the finding of the
“indecipherable” document, if we can so call it; the information it
concealed, the assurance that it contained, or rather the wish that it
contained, the material proof of the guiltlessness of Joam Dacosta; and
the hope that it was written by the real culprit--all these things had
contributed to work the change in public opinion. What the people had
desired and impatiently demanded forty-eight hours before, they now
feared, and that was the arrival of the instructions due from Rio de
Janeiro.
These, however, were not likely to be delayed.
Joam Dacosta had been arrested on the 24th of August, and examined next
day. The judge’s report was sent off on the 26th. It was now the 28th.
In three or four days more the minister would have come to a decision
regarding the convict, and it was only too certain that justice would
take its course.
There was no doubt that such would be the case. On the other hand, that
the assurance of Dacosta’s innocence would appear from the document,
was not doubted by anybody, neither by his family nor by the fickle
population of Manaos, who excitedly followed the phases of this dramatic
affair.
But, on the other hand, in the eyes of disinterested or indifferent
persons who were not affected by the event, what value could be assigned
to this document? and how could they even declare that it referred to
the crime in the diamond arrayal? It existed, that was undeniable; it
had been found on the corpse of Torres, nothing could be more certain.
It could even be seen, by comparing it with the letter in which Torres
gave the information about Joam Dacosta, that the document was not in
the handwriting of the adventurer. But, as had been suggested by Judge
Jarriquez, why should not the scoundrel have invented it for the sake of
his bargain? And this was less unlikely to be the case, considering
that Torres had declined to part with it until after his marriage with
Dacosta’s daughter--that is to say, when it would have been impossible
to undo an accomplished fact.
All these views were held by some people in some form, and we can quite
understand what interest the affair created. In any case, the situation
of Joam Dacosta was most hazardous. If the document were not deciphered,
it would be just the same as if it did not exist; and if the secret of
the cryptogram were not miraculously divined or revealed before the end
of the three days, the supreme sentence would inevitably be suffered by
the doomed man of Tijuco. And this miracle a man attempted to perform!
The man was Jarriquez, and he now really set to work more in the
interest of Joam Dacosta than for the satisfaction of his analytical
faculties. A complete change had also taken place in his opinion. Was
not this man, who had voluntarily abandoned his retreat at Iquitos, who
had come at the risk of his life to demand his rehabilitation at the
hands of Brazilian justice, a moral enigma worth all the others put
together? And so the judge had resolved never to leave the document
until he had discovered the cipher. He set to work at it in a fury.
He ate no more; he slept no more! All his time was passed in inventing
combinations of numbers, in forging a key to force this lock!
This idea had taken possession of Judge Jarriquez’s brain at the end
of the first day. Suppressed frenzy consumed him, and kept him in a
perpetual heat. His whole house trembled; his servants, black or white,
dared not come near him. Fortunately he was a bachelor; had there been
a Madame Jarriquez she would have had a very uncomfortable time of
it. Never had a problem so taken possession of this oddity, and he had
thoroughly made up his mind to get at the solution, even if his head
exploded like an overheated boiler under the tension of its vapor.
It was perfectly clear to the mind of the worthy magistrate that the key
to the document was a number, composed of two or more ciphers, but what
this number was all investigation seemed powerless to discover.
This was the enterprise on which Jarriquez, in quite a fury, was
engaged, and during this 28th of August he brought all his faculties to
bear on it, and worked away almost superhumanly.
To arrive at the number by chance, he said, was to lose himself in
millions of combinations, which would absorb the life of a first-rate
calculator. But if he could in no respect reckon on chance, was it
impossible to proceed by reasoning? Decidedly not! And so it was “to
reason till he became unreasoning” that Judge Jarriquez gave himself up
after vainly seeking repose in a few hours of sleep. He who ventured
in upon him at this moment, after braving the formal defenses which
protected his solitude, would have found him, as on the day before,
in his study, before his desk, with the document under his eyes, the
thousands of letters of which seemed all jumbled together and flying
about his head.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, “why did not the scoundrel who wrote this separate
the words in this paragraph? We might--we will try--but no! However, if
there is anything here about the murder and the robbery, two or three
words there must be in it--‘arrayal,’ ‘diamond,’ ‘Tijuco,’ ‘Dacosta,’
and others; and in putting down their cryptological equivalents
the number could be arrived at. But there is nothing--not a single
break!--not one word by itself! One word of two hundred and seventy-six
letters! I hope the wretch may be blessed two hundred and seventy-six
times for complicating his system in this way! He ought to be hanged two
hundred and seventy-six times!”
And a violent thump with his fist on the document emphasized this
charitable wish.
“But,” continued the magistrate, “if I cannot find one of the words in
the body of the document, I might at least try my hand at the beginning
and end of each paragraph. There may be a chance there that I ought not
to miss.”
And impressed with this idea Judge Jarriquez successively tried if the
letters which commenced or finished the different paragraphs could be
made to correspond with those which formed the most important word,
which was sure to be found somewhre, that of -Dacosta-.
He could do nothing of the kind.
In fact, to take only the last paragraph with which he began, the
formula was:
P = D h = a
y = c f = o
s = s l = t
y = a
Now, at the very first letter Jarriquez was stopped in his calculations,
for the difference in alphabetical position between the -d- and the
-p- gave him not one cipher, but two, namely, 12, and in this kind of
cryptograph only one letter can take the place of another.
It was the same for the seven last letters of the paragraph, -p s u v
j h d,- of which the series also commences with a -p,- and which in no
case could stand for the -d- in -Dacosta,- because these letters were in
like manner twelve spaces apart.
So it was not his name that figured here.
The same observation applies to the words -arrayal- and -Tijuco,- which
were successively tried, but whose construction did not correspond with
the cryptographic series.
After he had got so far, Judge Jarriquez, with his head nearly
splitting, arose and paced his office, went for fresh air to the
window, and gave utterance to a growl, at the noise of which a flock
of hummingbirds, murmuring among the foliage of a mimosa tree, betook
themselves to flight. Then he returned to the document.
He picked it up and turned it over and over.
“The humbug! the rascal!” he hissed; “it will end by driving me mad! But
steady! Be calm! Don’t let our spirits go down! This is not the time!”
And then, having refreshed himself by giving his head a thorough
sluicing with cold water:
“Let us try another way,” he said, “and as I cannot hit upon the number
from the arrangement of the letters, let us see what number the author
of the document would have chosen in confessing that he was the author
of the crime at Tijuco.”
This was another method for the magistrate to enter upon, and maybe he
was right, for there was a certain amount of logic about it.
“And first let us try a date! Why should not the culprit have taken the
date of the year in which Dacosta, the innocent man he allowed to be
sentenced in his own place, was born? Was he likely to forget a number
which was so important to him? Then Joam Dacosta was born in 1804. Let
us see what 1804 will give us as a cryptographical number.”
And Judge Jarriquez wrote the first letters of the paragraph, and
putting over them the number 1804 repeated thrice, he obtained
1804 1804 1804
-phyj slyd dqfd-
Then in counting up the spaces in alphabetical order, he obtained
-s.yf rdy. cif.-
And this was meaningless! And he wanted three letters which he had to
replace by points, because the ciphers, 8, 4, and 4, which command the
three letters, -h, d,- and -d,- do not give corresponding letters in
ascending the series.
“That is not it again!” exclaimed Jarriquez. “Let us try another
number.”
And he asked himself, if instead of this first date the author of the
document had not rather selected the date of the year in which the crime
was committed.
This was in 1826.
And so proceeding as above, he obtained.
1826 1826 1826
-phyj slyd dqfd-
and that gave
-o.vd rdv. cid.-
the same meaningless series, the same absence of sense, as many letters
wanting as in the former instance, and for the same reason.
“Bother the number!” exclaimed the magistrate. “We must give it up
again. Let us have another one! Perhaps the rascal chose the number of
contos representing the amount of the booty!”
Now the value of the stolen diamonds was estimated at eight hundred and
thirty-four contos, or about 2,500,000 francs, and so the formula became
834 834 834 834
-phy jsl ydd qfd-
and this gave a result as little gratifying as the others----
-het bph pa. ic.-
“Confound the document and him who imagined it!” shouted Jarriquez,
throwing down the paper, which was wafted to the other side of the room.
“It would try the patience of a saint!”
But the short burst of anger passed away, and the magistrate, who had
no idea of being beaten, picked up the paper. What he had done with the
first letters of the different paragraphs he did with the last--and
to no purpose. Then he tried everything his excited imagination could
suggest.
He tried in succession the numbers which represented Dacosta’s age,
which would have been known to the author of the crime, the date of his
arrest, the date of the sentence at the Villa Rica assizes, the date
fixed for the execution, etc., etc., even the number of victims at the
affray at Tijuco!
Nothing! All the time nothing!
Judge Jarriquez had worked himself into such a state of exasperation
that there really was some fear that his mental faculties would lose
their balance. He jumped about, and twisted about, and wrestled about as
if he really had got hold of his enemy’s body. Then suddenly he cried,
“Now for chance! Heaven help me now, logic is powerless!”
His hand seized a bell-pull hanging near his table. The bell rang
furiously, and the magistrate strode up to the door, which he opened.
“Bobo!” he shouted.
A moment or two elapsed.
Bobo was a freed negro, who was the privileged servant of Jarriquez.
He did not appear; it was evident that Bobo was afraid to come into his
master’s room.
Another ring at the bell; another call to Bobo, who, for his own safety,
pretended to be deaf on this occasion. And now a third ring at the bell,
which unhitched the crank and broke the cord.
This time Bobo came up. “What is it, sir?” asked Bobo, prudently waiting
on the threshold.
“Advance, without uttering a single word!” replied the judge, whose
flaming eyes made the negro quake again.
Bobo advanced.
“Bobo,” said Jarriquez, “attend to what I say, and answer immediately;
do not even take time to think, or I----”
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