He spoke with an unmistakable fatalism. "You don't mean--that he's gone like the rest----"

I heard our low breathing as I waited for his answer. "What's the use of fooling ourselves any more, Killdare?" he replied quietly. "We're up against something--G.o.d knows what. Of course he's gone--just like the rest. Where else could he be?"

We turned once more into his room. Wilkson had reported rightly--his bed had not been slept in, and there was not the slightest sign of disorder.

His coat--a well-made garment of some gray, cotton cloth hung on the back of his chair, and the b.u.t.ts of two cigars lay on his smoking stand.

He was not in his bathroom, nor did we hear his voice from some adjoining room.

And now all the other guests, all of whom slept on this same floor, were gathering about us, wakened by the sound of our voices. Marten came, swearing under his breath, and Van Hope's brow was beaded with perspiration that glistened in the dim light. But none of them knew where Major Dell was. Indeed none of them had seen him since he had gone to his room.

There was a curious, dream-like quality about the little session that we had together at the door of Dell's room. It was all rather dim, obscure, the voices that we heard seemed to come from some place far off, and that ring of faces no longer looked clear-cut and sharp. I suppose the answer lay in the great preoccupation that was upon us all, a struggle for understanding that engulfed our minds.

There were no excited, frenzied voices. The men spoke rather quietly and slowly, as if measuring their words, and Van Hope was smiling, faintly.

It wasn't a mirthful smile, but rather a wan smile such as a man gives when some incredible disaster, long expected, has fallen upon him. None of us liked to see it. There was nothing to believe but that the mystery had gone home to him more fully than to any one else--and we all wished that he could be spared the tragic, vain hour of search that awaited us.

Because none of us had the least hope, in our own hearts, that we would ever see Major Dell again. We had got past the point where we could deceive ourselves. The truth was all too self-evident. We would search through the grounds, as a matter of duty we would call and run back and forth. But the end was already sure.

Indeed, there was no look of surprise on any one of those white faces.

Rather they had a helpless, almost fatalistic expression, as men have when at last they are crushed to earth by the inevitable. I have heard a detachment of soldiers, seemingly trapped by death, speak in the same quiet way, and have seen the same baffled, resigned expression on their faces.

I didn't try to keep track of who was there and who was absent. It was impossible to think of such things now. But bitter, blasting fear surged through me when I thought of Edith--wondering if she was safe in her room.

There was a moment of stress, a sudden, momentary explosion of suppressed excitement, when Slatterly the sheriff joined us in the hall.

We heard his running feet in the corridor, and we turned to watch him, his dressing-gown flopping about him. Evidently he had heard our words from his room in the upper corridor. Certain exclamations were on his lips--whether they were profane oaths I do not know.

"What is it?" he demanded in an irritable, rasping voice. "Why are you all gathered here?"

Silently we waited for Nopp to speak--Nopp who had become the strongest arm in the affair. "We're not having any late evening gossip," he answered. "Kastle Krags has its tail up again. We're here--to find out what has become of Major Dell."

"Major Dell! Good G.o.d, don't tell me he's gone too."

Instantly the sudden, deadly surge of wrath we had all felt toward the sheriff died in our b.r.e.a.s.t.s. That cry he made, the hopeless, defeated way in which he spoke, made him, in an instant, one of us--subject to the same fear and despair, a crushed and impotent human being like ourselves.

"He's gone," Nopp told him quietly. "He's not in his room. He doesn't seem to be any place else."

"Have you searched? I don't suppose there's any use of it, but we've got to search. Oh, why didn't I guard him--why did I ever take such a criminal risk!"

None of us could forget his rugged, brown face in the wan electric light. Whether it was regret or fear that swept it we didn't know. It was ashen, almost expressionless, and his eyes were lifeless under his heavy brows. His hands hung, fingers slightly apart, at his side.

"Wait just a minute before we begin an indiscriminate search," Nopp said. "Slatterly, we've got to face facts. Do you think--there's any place in these grounds that none of us _ought to go_?"

We knew what he meant. He wanted to guard against further loss of life.

"The thing seems to run according to rule," the sheriff replied, rather grimly. "Just one gone--every night. But keep together when you're down near the lagoon."

There was not the least good in searching further through the house.

Most of the household had gathered around us, by now, and no one had seen Major Dell. We walked the length of the corridor and down the stairs, and then we went out into the still darkness. The hour was evidently shortly after midnight--the tide was almost at its flood.

Just a moment more we stood just below the great veranda, and no man knew the other's thoughts. The moon was rising--we could see its argent gleam through nebulous clouds to the East. Far away the gray sh.o.r.e stretched to the darkened sea, and the natural rock wall showed a faint, gray line. Then we headed out into the grounds.

But there was no answer to the calls we made, and only such little people as moles and gophers, burrowers in the ground, stirred in the thickets as we crushed through. We hunted aimlessly, more to satisfy our own sense of duty than through any expectation of finding the missing man. The moon came out more vividly, but its light did not bring success. At last we collected, a silent, rather breathless group, in front of the house.

"What now, Slatterly?" Nopp asked. "Is there anything more we can do?"

"Nothing more." His old confidence was gone from his voice. "I wish I'd done something long ago, instead of being so sure. But this thing can't happen to-morrow night."

"Slatterly, you're a brave man to say that _anything_ can't happen to-morrow night. I thought you'd learned your lesson----"

"I have. Never fear for that. To-morrow night I'm going to watch beside that lagoon with a loaded gun--and I am going to see this thing through."

CHAPTER XXI

The sheriff had finished his investigations by noon of the following day, and after lunch I was free to work upon the problem that I felt was the key to the whole mystery--the cryptogram beside Florey's body.

Lately I had been thinking that in all probability to procure the script had been the direct motive of the murder; and the fact of its theft from my room seemed to bear me out.

Why wasn't it reasonable to presume that in the last instant of Florey's life, just before the attack was made, he had attempted to conceal the script. He had thrown it from him; his death-cry had aroused the household so that the murderer had no time to seek and procure it. Then from a hiding place, or even from among a group of the guests, he had seen me pick it up.

To work out that cryptogram, to read its hidden meaning was the first and the best thing I could do in the way to solve the mystery of Kastle Krags. Written originally on parchment, sixty or seventy years before, it doubtless referred and was in explanation of the secret of the old manor house--the legend of the treasure, supposedly hidden by G.o.dfrey Jason in the long ago. I had just toyed with it before. Perhaps I had had little faith that it was of any real importance. But now, other avenues had failed, and I was resolved to know the truth if it was humanly possible to do so. I copied the script again, with great care:

aned dqbo aqcd trkm fipj dqbo seho ohuy wvyn dljn dtht

Then I began to make a systematic a.n.a.lysis. I noticed first that the second and the sixth words were identical, indicating--considering the brevity of the entire message--that it must represent a word of most frequent use. Of course the articles "a" and "the" occur most often in any English writing, yet I found it hard to believe that "dqbo"

represented either. In the first place, in a message of that length it is reasonable to a.s.sume that all articles and words not absolutely necessary to the meaning had been omitted.

Weeks that seemed years before Nealman had told me that, after careful study, he had been convinced that there was some truth in the legend of buried treasure. Was it not within the bounds of reason to a.s.sume that this cryptic message revealed the hiding place of the treasure? Working on this a.s.sumption, I made up an imaginary description of some hiding place, just to see what words occurred with the greatest frequency. I found at once that the word that would be most likely to be used twice in a description of that kind would be some measurement--either feet, yards, meters, rods, or something of the kind. If I could convince myself that "dqbo" represented some English measurement I might find the key and system of the code.

Either "feet," "yard" or "rods" were words of four letters--either one of which might be represented by "dqbo." Then I tested each one to see if I could establish a pattern.

I tried first the old code-system of having each letter in the word represent some other letter a certain number of s.p.a.ces backward or forward in the alphabet. Suppose a man wanted to disguise the word "cab." He might do so, very easily, by spelling it "dbc"--using, instead of the right letter, the letter immediately following it in the alphabet, "d" for "c," "b" for "a," etc. Testing for "feet" as a possible interpretation of "dqbo" I saw that "f" was the second letter in the alphabet beyond the letter "d"--first letter in the script-word--but I found that such a relation could not possibly hold with "e" and "q" respectively, the second letters. "Yard" or "rods"

failed the same test. Nor by any juggling of this simple code, counting so many s.p.a.ces backwards or forwards, could I make it come out true.

Some time before I had decided that it was unlikely to the verge of impossibility that any message could be made up completely of four letter words. It seemed likely, at first, that letters had been cut from each word in order to make them of four letters. Working on this hypothesis I tested for "meters" but the word "dqbo" could not be made to conform.

At that point it was necessary to begin on another tack. I smoked a while in silence, hoping that some idea, some little inspiration that so often furnished the key for such a mystery as this, would come to me.

I had a dim thought that, since the words were all of four letters and could not be made intelligible by any shifting of the alphabet, that perhaps it had undergone some double transformation--changed first from words into some other symbol form, and then back into words. But I couldn't seem to get hold.

If I could only see the key! Possibly it was extremely simple, just before my eyes if I could only grasp it. It wasn't reasonable, I thought, for a lone man to leave a hidden message without giving some key, however adroit, for the reader to translate it. Jason hadn't written that message for his own amus.e.m.e.nt. He had inscribed it to be read by some one who came after--perhaps by himself when old age had dulled his memory.

Working from this point of view I set myself to remember what had been written on the parchment beside the column of figures. Perhaps the key had been there also; I had simply failed to observe it. At the bottom of the message had appeared the words "At F. T." And at first this seemed to offer the most interesting possibilities.

Certainly the word and letters had some meaning. In the first place this, and the sentence above the script, indicated that the writer did his thinking in English--not in Spanish or Portuguese or any other language. But "F. T." did not convey any meaning to my mind. I simply couldn't catch it.

I tried to make the letters "F" and "T" a starting point in the alphabet for rearranging the letters in the column of words, on the same theory that I had worked at first, but nothing came of it. And at that point my hopes and confidence, falling steadily for the past hour, was at its lowest ebb. I didn't see but that I would have to give up the venture after all.

My mind slipped easily to the message in English above the column--"Sworn by the Book," or something after that nature. Taking these words simply as they seemed, an oath on the part of the writer that the ensuing message was true, I hadn't taken the trouble to copy them from the original parchment. Fortunately I remembered them, approximately at least. And I felt a little quickening of hope as I contemplated them.