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 explaimed, “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