Mr. Fortescue - William Westall (i read a book .txt) 📗

exactly the thing. As you say, telling a long story is troublesome. I can read it."

"I am afraid not. It is written in a sort of stenographic cipher of my own invention."

"That is very awkward," I said, despondently. "I know no more of shorthand than of Sanskrit, and though I once tried to make out a cipher, the only tangible result was a splitting headache."

"With the key, which I will give you, a little instruction and practice, you should have no difficulty in making out my cipher. It will be an exercise for your intelligence"--smiling. "Will you try?"

"My very best."

"And now for the conditions. In the first place, you must, in stenographic phrase, 'extend' my notes, write out the narrative in a legible hand and good English. If there be any blanks, I will fill them up; if you require explanations, I will give them. Do you agree?"

"I agree."

"The second condition is that you neither make use of the narrative for any purpose of your own, nor disclose the whole or any part of it to anybody until and unless I give you leave. What say you?"

"I say yes."

"The third and last condition is, that you engage to stay with me in your present capacity until it pleases me to give you your _conge_. Again what say you?"

This was rather a "big order," and very one-sided. It bound me to remain with Mr. Fortescue for an indefinite period, yet left him at liberty to dismiss me at a moment's notice; and if he went on living, I might have to stay at Kingscote till I was old and gray. All the same, the position was a good one. I had four hundred a year (the price at which I had modestly appraised my services), free quarters, a pleasant life, and lots of hunting--all I could wish for, in fact; and what can a man have more? So again I said, "Yes."

"We are agreed in all points, then. If you will come into my room "--we were by this time arrived at the house--"you shall have your first lesson in cryptography."

I assented with eagerness, for I was burning to begin, and, from what Mr. Fortescue had said, I did not anticipate any great difficulty in making out the cipher.

But when he produced a specimen page of his manuscript, my confidence, like Bob Acre's courage, oozed out at my finger-ends, or rather, all over me, for I broke out into a cold sweat.

The first few lines resembled a confused array of algebraic formula. (I detest algebra.) Then came several lines that seemed to have been made by the crawlings of tipsy flies with inky legs, followed by half a dozen or so that looked like the ravings of a lunatic done into Welsh, while the remainder consisted of Roman numerals and ordinary figures mixed up, higgledy-piggledy.

"This is nothing less than appalling," I almost groaned. "It will take me longer to learn than two or three languages."

"Oh, no! When you have got the clew, and learned the signs, you will read the cipher with ease."

"Very likely; but when will that be?"

"Soon. The system is not nearly so complicated as it looks, and the language being English--"

"English! It looks like a mixture of ancient Mexican and modern Chinese."

"The language being English, nothing could be easier for a man of ordinary intelligence. If I had expected that my manuscript would fall into the hands of a cryptographist, I should have contrived something much more complicated and written it in several languages; and you have the key ready to your hand. Come, let us begin."

After half an hour's instruction I began to see daylight, and to feel that with patience and practice I should be able to write out the story in legible English. The little I had read with Mr. Fortescue made me keen to know more; but as the cryptographic narrative did not begin at the beginning, he proposed that I should write this, as also any other missing parts, to his dictation.

"Who knows that you may not make a book of it?" he said.

"Do you think I am intelligent Enough?" I asked, resentfully; for his uncomplimentary references to my mental capacity were still rankling in my mind.

"I should hope so. Everybody writes in these days. Don't worry yourself on that score, my dear Mr. Bacon. Even though you may write a book, nobody will accuse you of being exceptionally intelligent."

"But I cannot make a book of your narrative without your leave," I observed, with a painful sense of having gained nothing by my motion.

"And that leave may be sooner or later forthcoming, on conditions."

As the reader will find in the sequel, the leave has been given and the conditions have been fulfilled, and Mr. Fortescue's personal narrative--partly taken down from his own dictation, but for the most part extended from his manuscript--begins with the following chapter.


CHAPTER VI.

THE TALE BEGINS.

The morning after the battle of Salamanca (through which I passed unscathed) the regiment of dragoons to which I belonged (forming part of Anson's brigade), together with Bock's Germans, was ordered to follow on the traces of the flying French, who had retired across the River Tormes. Though we started at daylight, we did not come up with their rear-guard until noon. It consisted of a strong force of horse and foot, and made a stand near La Serna; but the cavalry, who had received a severe lesson on the previous day, bolted before we could cross swords with them. The infantry, however, remained firm, and forming square, faced us like men. The order was then given to charge; and when the two brigades broke into a gallop and thundered down the slope, they raised so thick a cloud of dust that all we could see of the enemy was the glitter of their bayonets and the flash of their musket-fire. Saddles were emptied both to the right and left of me, and one of the riderless horses, maddened by a wound in the head, dashed wildly forward, and leaping among the bayonets and lashing out furiously with his hind-legs, opened a way into the square. I was the first man through the gap, and engaged the French colonel in a hand-to-hand combat. At the very moment just as I gave him the point in his throat he cut open my shoulder, my horse, mortally hurt by a bayonet thrust, fell, half rolling over me and crushing my leg.

As I lay on the ground, faint with the loss of blood and unable to rise, some of our fellows rode over me, and being hit on the head by one of their horses, I lost consciousness. When I came to myself the skirmish was over, nearly the whole of the French rear-guard had been taken prisoners or cut to pieces, and a surgeon was dressing my wounds. This done, I was removed in an ambulance to Salamanca.

The historic old city, with its steep, narrow streets, numerous convents, and famous university, had been well-nigh ruined by the French, who had pulled down half the convents and nearly all the colleges, and used the stones for the building of forts, which, a few weeks previously, Wellington had bombarded with red-hot shot.

The hospitals being crowded with sick and wounded, I was billeted in the house of a certain Senor Don Alberto Zamorra, which (probably owing to the fact of its having been the quarters of a French colonel) had not taken much harm, either during the French occupation of the town or the subsequent siege of the forts.

Don Alberto gave me a hearty, albeit a dignified welcome, and being a Spanish gentleman of the old school, he naturally placed his house, and all that it contained, at my disposal. I did not, of course, take this assurance literally, and had I not been on the right side, I should doubtless have met with a very different reception. All the same, he made a very agreeable host, and before I had been his guest many days we became fast friends.

Don Zamorra was old, nearly as old as I am now; and as I speedily discovered, he had passed the greater part of his life in Spanish America, where he had held high office under the crown. He could hardly talk about anything else, in fact, and once he began to discourse about his former greatness and the marvels of the Indies (as South and Central America were then sometimes called) he never knew when to stop. He had crossed the Andes and seen the Amazon, sailed down the Orinoco and visited the mines of Potosi and Guanajuata, beheld the fiery summit of Cotopaxi, and peeped down the smoky crater of Acatenango. He told of fights with Indians and wild animals, of being lost in the forest, and of perilous expeditions in search of gold and precious stones. When Zamorra spoke of gold his whole attitude changed, the fires of his youth blazed up afresh, his face glowed with excitement, and his eyes sparkled with greed. At these times I saw in him a true type of the old Spanish Conquestadores, who would baptize a cacique to save him from hell one day, and kill him and loot his treasure the next.

Don Alberto had, moreover, a firm belief in the existence of the fabled El Dorado, and of the city of Manoa, with its resplendent house of the sun, its hoards of silver and gold, and its gilded king. Thousands of adventurers had gone forth in search of these wonders, and thousands had perished in the attempt to find them. Senor Zamorra had sought El Dorado on the banks of the Orinoco and the Rio Negro; others, near the source of the Rio Grande and the Maranon; others, again, among the volcanoes of Salvador and the canons of the Cordilleras. Zamorra believed that it lay either in the wilds of Guiana, or the unexplored confines of Peru and the Brazils.

He had heard of and believed even greater wonders--of a stream on the Pacific coast of Mexico, whose pebbles were silver, and whose sand was gold; of a volcano in the Peruvian Cordillera, whose crater was lined with the noblest of metals, and which once in every hundred years ejected, for days together, diamonds, and rubies, and dust of gold.

"If that volcano could only be found," said the don, with a convulsive clutching of his bony fingers, and a greedy glare in his aged eyes. "If that volcano could only be found! Why, it must be made of gold, and covered with precious stones! The man who found it would be the richest in all the world--richer than all the people in the world put together!"

"Did you ever see it, Don Alberto?" I asked.

"Did I ever see it?" he cried, uplifting his withered hands. "If I had seen that volcano you would never have seen me, but you would have heard of me. I had it from an Indio whose father once saw it with his own eyes; but I was too old, too old"--sighing--"to go on the quest. To undertake such an enterprise a man should be in the prime of life and go alone. A single companion, even though he were your own brother, might be fatal; for what virtue could be proof against so great a temptation--millions of diamonds and a mountain of gold?"

All this roused my curiosity and fired my imagination--not that I believed it all, for Zamorra was evidently a visionary with