The Message. Louis Tracy

      CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      WHEREIN A STRONG MAN YIELDS TO CIRCUMSTANCES

      Curiosity, most potent of the primal instincts, conquered the girl’s fear. As it happened, Warden was still kneeling. He sat back on his heels, rested the calabash against his knees, and withdrew a strip of dried skin from its cunningly devised hiding–place. It was so curled and withered that it crackled beneath his fingers when he tried to unfold it. Quite without premeditation, he had placed the calabash in such wise that the negro’s features were hidden, and this fact alone seemed to give his companion confidence.

      “What is it?” she asked, watching his efforts to persuade the twisted scroll to remain open.

      “Parchment, and uncommonly tough and leathery at that.”

      He did not look up. A queer notion was forming in his mind, and he was unwishful to meet her eyes just then.

      “It looks very old,” she said.

      “A really respectable antique, I fancy. Have you any pins—four, or more?”

      She produced from a pocket a small hussif with its store of sewing accessories.

      “A genie of the feminine order!” he cried. “I was merely hoping for a supply of those superfluous pins that used to lurk in my sister’s attire and only revealed their presence when I tried to reduce her to subjection.”

      “Oh, you have a sister?”

      “Yes—married—husband ranching in Montana.”

      Meanwhile he was fastening the refractory document to the deck. With patience, helped by half a dozen pins, he managed to smooth it sufficiently to permit of detailed scrutiny. The girl, wholly interested now, knelt beside him. Any observer in a passing boat might have imagined that they were engaged in some profoundly devotional exercise. But the planks were hard. Miss Dane, seeing nothing but wrinkled parchment, yellow with age, and covered with strange scrawls that seemed to be more a part of the actual material than written on its surface, soon rose.

      “Those hieroglyphics are beyond my ken,” she explained.

      “They are Arabic,” said Warden—“Arabic characters, that is. The words are Latin—at least to some extent. Epistola Pauli Hebraicis has the ring of old Rome about it, even if it wears the garb of Mahomet.”

      He straightened himself suddenly, and shouted for Chris with such energy that the girl was startled.

      Chris popped his head out of the fore hatch, and was told to bring his father’s Bible, for Peter read two of its seven hundred odd pages each day in the year.

      Warden compared book and scroll intently during many minutes. Miss Dane did not interrupt. She contented herself with a somewhat prolonged investigation of Warden’s face, or so much of it as was visible. Then she turned away and gazed at the Sans Souci. There was a wistful look in her eyes. Perhaps she wished that circumstances had contrived to exchange the yacht for the pilot–boat. At any rate, she was glad he had a sister. If only she had a brother!—just such a one!

      At last the man’s deep, rather curt voice broke the silence.

      “I have solved a part of the puzzle, Miss Dane,” he announced. “My Latinity was severely tried, but the chapter and verse gave me the English equivalent, and that supplied the key. Some one has that—some one has written here portions of the 37th and 38th verses of the eleventh chapter of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews. Our version runs: ‘They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword … they wandered in deserts and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth.’ The remainder of the text is in yet another language—Portuguese, I imagine—but my small lore in that tongue is of no avail. In any case my vocabulary could not possibly consort with the stately utterances of St. Paul, as it consists mainly of remarks adapted to the intelligence of a certain type of freebooter peculiar to the West African hinterland.”

      “What do you make of it all?” she asked.

      “At present—nothing. It is an enigma, until I secure a Portuguese–English dictionary. Then I shall know more. Judging by appearances, the message, whatsoever it may be, is complete.”

      “What sort of skin is that?”

      He lifted his eyes slowly. She was conscious of a curious searching quality in his glance that she had not seen there before.

      “It is hard to say,” he answered. And, indeed, he spoke the literal truth, being fully assured that the shriveled parchment pinned to the deck had once covered the bones of a white man.

      “The writing is funny, too,” she went on, with charming disregard for the meaning of words.

      “It is pricked in with a needle and Indian ink,” he explained. “That is an indelible method,” he continued hurriedly, seeing that she was striving to recall something that the phrase reminded her of, and here was a real danger of the suggestive word which had so nearly escaped his lips being brought to her recollection. “You see, I have been able to identify the gentleman who served the artist as model,” and he tapped the gourd lightly. “Therefore, I am sure that this comes from a land where pen and ink were unknown in the days when some unhappy Christian fashioned such a quaint contrivance to carry his screed.”

      “Some unhappy Christian!” she repeated. “You mean that some European probably fell into the hands of West African savages years and years ago,