Fire Mountain Part 17

"Yes--the poor devil!" echoed Little Billy. "My very words, as I finished reading, there in Kim Chee's place. 'The poor devil!' A fitting epitaph."

"But why an epitaph?" asked Martin quickly. Visions of an eleventh-hour rescue were surging through his mind. He felt one was necessary to round out his reel of pictures. "Could he not have been rescued after making that last entry? Why, he must have been rescued!

How else could the journal have reached Honolulu?"

"He was picked up," interposed Ruth.

"By another whaler," added Little Billy. "Sick to death, and completely lunatic. He never recovered his reason. He died in Kim Chee's place. But I will continue my yarn, and you will see.

"You can imagine, of course, the progressive transformation I underwent, while curled up on that old sea-chest, perusing the log. I began merely with the intention of forcing my mind away from myself, and thereby quieting my booze-jangled nerves; in a moment, I was interested; then I was excited by the whalemen's discovery of the ambergris, and lastly I was overwhelmed by the fact that John Winters's Fire Mountain was identical with the _Coha.s.set's_ Fire Mountain. The description clinched that fact. And to make more certain, I recalled the wreckage the captain and I had come across, and the board with the nearly effaced lettering upon it. The letters upon that board were, 'LUC,' and beneath, the word 'BEDFORD.' Of course, it was the remnant of '_Good Luck_, of New Bedford.'

"It was about four o'clock in the morning when I finished the book. I summoned the Chinaman, straightway. Kim was asleep, and he came grumbling, in answer to my call. He thought I wanted drink, but John Winters had effectually doused the flame in my vitals. I had happened upon the probable clew to a vast treasure, and the thought of it obsessed me.

"I put the question to Kim as to how the journal came to be in the Chamber of Horrors. It was a poser for Kim. His old yellow face wrinkled into a thousand dark creases, in the lantern's dim light, and his shrewd, beady eyes wandered uncertainly between the book and my face. But at last he remembered, and in his forcible and inimitable manner he enlightened me.

"'Why flor you sing out? Me catchie one piecie dleam. You no catchie 'lisky? Why flor you want? Me savvy blook. Long time--one time come glease s.h.i.+p. Up no'lth, sailorman he catchie one fellow walk about one piecie boat alone. Velly sick. Catch 'im bats in 'liskers. Bring um Kim Chee. Sailorman go 'way-- ---- 'tief! No pay. Qleer fellow velly sick. No eat, no dlink, velly 'ot--all time tlalk, tlalk, about plecie glease. ---- fool clazy! Bimeby die. Flind piecie blook under clothes. Kim Chee no savvy. Why flor you want blook? 'Ow much you got? Dolla flive---all light, you take. Me go bed.'

"From which discourse, I gathered that Kim Chee had been rudely interrupted in the midst of a sweet dream; that he could not fathom my sudden distaste for whisky; that a long time ago a whales.h.i.+p had come into port with a sick man aboard, whom they had picked up in an open boat, up north; that they had brought the sick man to Kim, and departed without paying over any money; that Kim Chee had cared for the sick man, until the latter died; that the sick man had been out of his head, had talked constantly of 'grease,' had been crazy; that Kim had removed the diary from the man's body, after death; that he would let me have it gladly for a dollar and five cents; that he was going back to bed and didn't want to be disturbed again by the unaccountable vagaries of a dipsomaniacal white man.

"I didn't bother Kim again. Indeed, I clasped my cheaply purchased treasure close, hied myself with speed to the docks, and had myself pulled off to the brig. My spree was ended, and I felt that I held in my hand the best piece of fortune that had befallen the happy family in many a day.

"I reasoned, you see, that the treasure of ambergris was still in its hiding-place on Fire Mountain--and subsequent events have not shaken that belief. I reasoned that Winters had been picked up some time after he had made his last entry in the log, that he was out of his head when rescued, and that he never regained sanity.

"His rescuers apparently did not bother to search him, or else, with the cunning of the crazed, Winters concealed from them his journal. If they had happened upon it, they would surely have appropriated it.

Their dumping him off on Kim Chee was not so heartless as it sounds--the sick man was undoubtedly better off ash.o.r.e in Hawaii than aboard a cruising whaler, and Kim Chee is famed for his charity from one end of the Pacific to the other.

"At breakfast that morning, I acquainted Ruth with the discovery, and read to her the pa.s.sages I read to you. It was an exciting breakfast.

"We were waited upon by Ichi, the little j.a.p we s.h.i.+pped as cook in Hakodate. Polite, stupid, unfamiliar with the English language, we did not think it necessary to guard our speech against him. Indeed, we never gave him a thought, and we discussed my find pro and con very freely. We dwelt upon the value of the treasure, verified the _Good Luck's_ reported loss by research, congratulated ourselves upon our knowledge of the position of Fire Mountain--all in the hearing of the self-effacing Ichi. We were only daunted by the prospect of searching blindly through that cave-riddled mountain. Then, Ruth found the code."

"Yes, it was pure luck," interposed Ruth. "I was examining the book, and I noticed a crack in the length of the cover. I looked more closely and discovered that the cover had been slit lengthwise, and that a piece of skin had been inserted."

"That is it--Exhibit A," said Little Billy. He pointed to the white strip on the table. "We recognized it instantly as the piece of parka lining Winters mentions using to write upon the secret of the cave. It is a piece of the skin of an unborn reindeer. The Kamchatka tribes line their fur garments with that skin, and Winters had evidently obtained his parka from them. The writing, you see, is all numerals."

Martin picked up and inspected the skin curiously. Unborn reindeer skin! He rubbed the glossy substance between his fingers. It felt uncanny to his touch, this relic of a long-past tragedy, this message from the world's end. And the message seemed to be no more than a faded jumble of figures. He read them carefully, searching in vain for some hint of meaning.

43344544536153314612151113236243361531153523113344 62315111464643441142123411421465224331454613115115 62635344244611313421446333442442361334423315426144 254613115115

[Transcriber's note: the first two rows of the above numbers in the source book had been defaced to the point of being almost unreadable.

A best guess was made on some of them.]

"But how do you know this is a code?" Martin asked curiously.

"Three excellent reasons," said Little Billy. "First, John Winters mentions writing down the secret of the treasure's location, and we discover this skin; second, your genial former employer deciphered these figures for the affable Ichi; third, Ruth and I proved the correctness of the deciphering this morning.

"I guess I had better acquaint you with the method of this means of communication. I don't know how a simple seaman, like John Winters seems to have been, could have become familiar with the art of cryptography--probably from reading, possibly devised the thing himself. It is very simple once you have the key--quite useful, too.

Ruth and I talked to each other through a wall by this code, back there in Bob Carew's lair. Consultation with Poe's _Gold Bug_, and an hour's application that morning after breakfast, gave me the key, though I had no chance that day to discover more. It is what is called a 'checker-board' code. Here, I will draw it out!"

The hunchback turned to a blank s.p.a.ce in the diary and rapidly sketched a diagram. He handed it across, for Martin's interested inspection, and Martin beheld the following:

1 2 3 4 5 1 a b c c e --- --- --- --- --- 2 f g h i j --- --- --- --- --- 3 l m n o p --- --- --- --- --- 4 q r s t u --- --- --- --- --- 5 v w x y z

Number 6 for s.p.a.cing between words

"You will observe that the letter 'k' is missing," said Little Billy.

"You use 'c' for 'k,' and to write a message, you merely write down the line the letter is on, and its position on that line. Thus, in Winters's message, the first two numerals are '43.' That means, fourth line, third letter, or the letter 's.' You see, you take the numbers in pairs--that is, until you reach a number 6.

"There are no numbers in the code above 5, so Winters used a 6 to indicate the s.p.a.ces between words. To ill.u.s.trate: Winters's secret begins with the numbers 43344544236. Pair these numbers off, and we have 43-34-45-44-23-6. Decipher with the diagram, and we have, 4th line 3rd letter, or 's,' 3rd line 4th letter, or 'o,' 4th line 5th letter, or 'u,' 4th line 4th letter, or 't,' 2nd line 3rd letter, or 'h.' That makes s-o-u-t-h, or the word 'south.'

"But there is no need of my continuing the translation. Friend Smatt has kindly attended to that for us. Here it is."

Martin took the proffered piece of paper, the piece of paper covered with Smatt's handwriting, that had come out of the envelope. He read in Lawyer Smatt's bold, angular hand,

South end beach--in elephant head--4 starboard--windy cave--2 port--aloft--north corner dry cave.

"That marks the location of our prospective, odorous loot," continued the hunchback. "No doubt about it. The captain and I remember very well the cave opening in the rock shaped like an elephant's head, on the south end of Fire Mountain's beach. It is up to us to get there first."

"But how did Smatt--" commenced Martin.

"How did Smatt come to be in possession of the skin? I am coming to that. The j.a.p, Ichi, brought it to him.

"That morning, after Ruth and I had discussed the diary, Ruth set out for sh.o.r.e to visit the captain in the hospital. She took Winters's book along with her to read to the captain--good thing she did, as it turned out. I stayed aboard and tackled the code. As I said, I discovered the key after an hour's or so application. That is, I had fathomed the checkerboard, had drawn a diagram, and had begun to decipher. Then my much-abused body went on strike.

"You remember, I was just at the end of an extended spree. For a week I had swum in stimulants and gone without rest. I was near a breakdown when Kim Chee took me in hand. The discovery of the log braced me up.

But all of a sudden, while I was working here in the cabin, over that sc.r.a.p of reindeer skin, I collapsed.

"I called for Ichi and ordered black coffee. I remember he answered my call by materializing almost instantly at my side. He must have been lingering behind my chair--though I do not recollect seeing him about the cabin after Ruth left for sh.o.r.e. He brought me a large cup of black coffee. I drank it, and went promptly to sleep. It may have been a drug, or it may have been nature having her way with me."

"It was drugged coffee the j.a.p gave you," stated Captain Dabney with finality. "I know those yellow imps!"

Martin started at the blind man's sudden interjection into the conversation. Since he had concluded his story, Captain Dabney had sat listening, immobile and silent. At times Martin had suspected him of dozing. But now, his emphatic outburst proved that he had followed Little Billy's words closely.

"That Ichi lad was no dunderhead," continued the captain. "He was playing a part aboard here. He was commissioned by that Hakodate crowd to discover our trading points--if this ambergrease affair hadn't turned up and tempted him, he would have stayed with us and made the trip north this Summer. Then next year a couple of j.a.p schooners would have gone ahead of us, peddling booze to the tribes, and killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Blast their yellow hides! I never traded with a trustworthy j.a.p in my life."

"Yes, he was doubtless a spy of the syndicate," a.s.sented Little Billy.

"Certainly he was playing a part aboard here, for when I ran across him yesterday morning, in Frisco, he was anything but the cookie of a wind-jammer, and his English showed a remarkable improvement.

"In any event, whether Ichi drugged my coffee or not, I was dead to the world as soon as I swallowed it. When the boatswain came aboard--he had been ash.o.r.e for a couple of days, searching for me--in the middle of the afternoon, he found me asleep in my chair. He thought I was drunk, and he picked me up and carried me to my bunk. When Ruth came aboard later, bringing the captain with her, it was discovered that Ichi had vanished, and Ruth had to prepare the cabin supper that night.

I slept till morning. When I awoke, I discovered that Winters's code had vanished with the cook."

"We also discovered that Ichi had tried unsuccessfully to open the safe in the captain's room," said Ruth. "He was undoubtedly after the old log book that contained the entry about the discovery of Fire Mountain, including the lat.i.tude and longitude."

"Well, he was successful enough in making off with the code," said Little Billy. "We combed Honolulu for him that day, without result.

Two s.h.i.+ps had left the afternoon before--one bound for the Orient, the other for California. Our missing cookie appeared upon the pa.s.senger list of neither vessel, but we concluded that he had taken steerage pa.s.sage for Yokohama.