America, he was perfectly indifferent to their splendors. Nothing
could distract his attention; neither the constant cry of the howling
monkeys, which St. Hillaire has graphically compared to the ax of the
woodman as he strikes the branches of the trees, nor the sharp jingle
of the rings of the rattlesnake (not an aggressive reptile, it is
true, but one of the most venomous); neither the bawling voice of the
horned toad, the most hideous of its kind, nor even the solemn and
sonorous croak of the bellowing frog, which, though it cannot equal
the bull in size, can surpass him in noise.
Torres heard nothing of all these sounds, which form, as it were, the
complex voice of the forests of the New World. Reclining at the foot
of a magnificent tree, he did not even admire the lofty boughs of
that _”pao ferro,”_ or iron wood, with its somber bark, hard as the
metal which it replaces in the weapon and utensil of the Indian
savage. No. Lost in thought, the captain of the woods turned the
curious paper again and again between his fingers. With the cipher,
of which he had the secret, he assigned to each letter its true
value. He read, he verified the sense of those lines, unintelligible
to all but him, and then he smiled–and a most unpleasant smile it
was.
Then he murmured some phrases in an undertone which none in the
solitude of the Peruvian forests could hear, and which no one, had he
been anywhere else, would have heard.
“Yes,” said he, at length, “here are a hundred lines very neatly
written, which, for some one that I know, have an importance that is
undoubted. That somebody is rich. It is a question of life or death
for him, and looked at in every way it will cost him something.” And,
scrutinizing the paper with greedy eyes, “At a conto [1] only for
each word of this last sentence it will amount to a considerable sum,
and it is this sentence which fixes the price. It sums up the entire
document. It gives their true names to true personages; but before
trying to understand it I ought to begin by counting the number of
words it contains, and even when this is done its true meaning may be
missed.”
In saying this Torres began to count mentally.
“There are fifty-eight words, and that makes fifty-eight contos. With
nothing but that one could live in Brazil, in America, wherever one
wished, and even live without doing anything! And what would it be,
then, if all the words of this document were paid for at the same
price? It would be necessary to count by hundreds of contos. Ah!
there is quite a fortune here for me to realize if I am not the
greatest of duffers!”
It seemed as though the hands of Torres felt the enormous sum, and
were already closing over the rolls of gold. Suddenly his thoughts
took another turn.
“At length,” he cried, “I see land; and I do not regret the voyage
which has led me from the coast of the Atlantic to the Upper Amazon.
But this man may quit America and go beyond the seas, and then how
can I touch him? But no! he is there, and if I climb to the top of
this tree I can see the roof under which he lives with his family!”
Then seizing the paper and shaking it with terrible meaning: “Before
to-morrow I will be in his presence; before to-morrow he will know
that his honor and his life are contained in these lines. And when he
wishes to see the cipher which permits him to read them, he–well, he
will pay for it. He will pay, if I wish it, with all his fortune, as
he ought to pay with all his blood! Ah! My worthy comrade, who gave
me this cipher, who told me where I could find his old colleague, and
the name under which he has been hiding himself for so many years,
hardly suspects that he has made my fortune!”
For the last time Torres glanced over the yellow paper, and then,