Читать книгу Four For A Fortune - Albert Lee - Страница 6

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THE labor I had so cheerfully assumed proved no easy task, as I very soon discovered, and I spent three hours of the afternoon in partially piecing out the lines where the words had been burned away. I did not expect to make any important discovery by doing this, but I wanted to have some results to show Carquemort at dinner-time. The broken sentence, as it appeared on my copy of the chart, ran thus:

Pour trouver la cach

on se met le dos

contre le mat

l’on marche

directe ver

croix sur

chiens u

de 25 pa

la pierr

creuse

The result of my labors was not remarkably satisfactory, but when the time came to start for Chiffard’s, I had arranged the sentence in this fashion:

Pour trouver la cachette on se met le dos contre le mat et (?) l’on marche en ligne (?) directe vers la croix sur chiens u de 25 pas la pierre creuse

To be sure, I had added but a few letters, yet I felt that, little as this was, I had accomplished something. There could be no doubt that cachette was the word indicated by cach, or that ver had been vers, pa had been pas, and pierr must have been pierre. I did not feel so sure about the insertion of the words en ligne at the end of the fourth line, or the article la at the end of the fifth; but they made sense, and that was something, for further along I could not make any sense at all. Translated, my revised version read: “To find the hiding-place, put your back against the mast and walk in a straight line directly towards the cross on…dogs …25 steps…the stone…dig.”

The first part of this, of course, was plain—that is, it was plain in so far as, by locating the hiding-place, it confirmed in a measure the statement, made in the words at the top of the chart, that there was treasure concealed somewhere on the island. But then, again, it was not plain at all, for the directions were exceedingly vague, and I could not help recalling the old fable of the three wise men who rowed to the middle of the lake and there threw a bag of gold overboard, marking the spot for future identification by cutting a notch in the side of their boat. My map-maker had apparently located the cachette on the island by standing with his back to the mast of his ship, and Heaven only knows where the ship was anchored or how the tide ran at the time he took his bearings. This was grievously discouraging. And as to what “the cross,” “dogs,” “25 steps,” and “stone” might mean I could not dream. As I walked through Washington Square and let the cool evening breeze blow across my feverish forehead, I wondered, in a confused, irrational sort of way, if the witless chart-maker had taken his line from the “mast” of a ship at sea to a “cross” on shore, where there was a pack of “dogs” standing “25 steps” from some “stone.” If such were the case, even with the island found, we should have a merry time searching for the spot to “dig” for the cachette. What bitter, bitter irony to invite us to dig on such slim, idiotic, worse than useless directions!

On afriving at the little restaurant in South Fifth Avenue, I found Thatcher and Carquemort already at table. So solemn looked Thatcher that there was no necessity for him to tell me his search among the West Indian islands had been fruitless; but it was nevertheless pleasing to hear him report his failure for the mere sake of enjoying the picturesqueness of his profanity. Carquemort had been sipping absinthe all the afternoon—so Chiffard told us later—and was in sullen mood. He was inclined to be querulous, wherefore Thatcher, whose temper had not been improved by his afternoon’s experience, ordered him to be quiet and bade him dine, that he might be the better possessed of his senses when Chiffard should join us later.

Madame was as cordial as ever, and her cheery announcement to her spouse of “ces messieurs sont là” rang out clearly through the room, bringing to me an assurance of gastronomic consolation at least. But the accursed chart had played sad havoc with Chiffard’s nerves, which, in turn, had affected his culinary prowess, for I think he never cooked a worse dinner in his life.

The editing of the burned portion of the chart, insignificant as it was, seemed to give the greatest gratification to Carquemort. He lost every vestige of sullenness in his examination of my writing, which he could not any more read than if it had been Syriac, and he displayed in the subsequent discussion an amount of intelligence and reasoning power of which his previous manner had not led us to believe him capable. His chief contribution towards the unravelling of the fragmentary directions was of greater importance than it appears as here set down. I was reviling the maker of the chart, to a soft obbligato of blasphemy and profanity by Thatcher, dwelling particularly upon the fact that the main point of direction, being taken from a movable object, was absolutely useless, when Carquemort remarked :

“You may not be right. It is possible that the mast was not on a ship.”

“Oh, of course,” I exclaimed, petulantly, “they may have unstepped their mast and stuck it in the sand, and they may have chained their dogs to the stone; but, confound it, all that is not probable.”

“You do not comprehend,” objected Carquemort. “The word mat in French means just as much a pole on land as a mast on a vessel. A flag-pole is a mat. Did you never see a mat de cocagne?”

Of course I had seen a mat de cocagne, and many a time. I had climbed one at the Fete de Neuilly in the good old days of my Franco-American infancy, and I wondered I had not recognized all along the amphibiousness of the term. Yet there was consolation in the fact that in days of old wiser heads than mine had failed at the egg trick until Mr. C. Columbus came along. And so Carquemort was our Columbus, and the foggy atmosphere of mystery over those directions became partially cleared away. How simple the sentence now appeared: “To find the hiding-place, put your back against the pole and walk in a straight line directly towards the cross on… dogs… 25 steps… the stone… dig.”

“But confound the cross on the dogs!” exclaimed Thatcher. “What on earth can be the connection between the dogs and the cross?”

“There must be some connection,” I said. “And yet there is not room for more than one or two words at the end of that line. We shall have to find out what they are before we can go much further.”

And so we puzzled and puzzled, but our labors bore no fruit; and we parted again, weary and mentally chafing, hoping against hope, but ever strong in our belief that in the end we must succeed. As the cynical Thatcher put it, this was a missing-word contest, limited to four competitors, with a prize of untold sums in gold. And so we kept on guessing.