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"Well, a kid then--pretty much the same thing."
"Pretty much, but not altogether," said Legrand. "You may have heard of one Captain Kidd. I at once looked
upon the figure of the animal as a kind of punning or hieroglyphical signature. I say signature; because its
position upon the vellum suggested this idea. The death's-head at the corner diagonally opposite, had, in the
same manner, the air of a stamp, or seal. But I was sorely put out by the absence of all else--of the body to
my imagined instrument--of the text for my context."
"I presume you expected to find a letter between the stamp and the signature."
"Something of that kind. The fact is, I felt irresistibly impressed with a presentiment of some vast good
fortune impending. I can scarcely say why. Perhaps, after all, it was rather a desire than an actual belief;--but
do you know that Jupiter's silly words, about the bug being of solid gold, had a remarkable effect upon my
fancy? And then the series of accidents and coincidences--these were so very extraordinary. Do you observe
how mere an accident it was that these events should have occurred upon the sole day of all the year in which
it has been, or may be sufficiently cool for fire, and that without the fire, or without the intervention of the
dog at the precise moment in which he appeared, I should never have become aware of the death's-head, and
so never the possessor of the treasure?"
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 The Black Cat and Other Stories
"But proceed--I am all impatience."
"Well; you have heard, of course, the many stories current--the thousand vague rumors afloat about money
buried, somewhere upon the Atlantic coast, by Kidd and his associates. These rumors must have had some
foundation in fact. And that the rumors have existed so long and so continuous, could have resulted, it
appeared to me, only from the circumstance of the buried treasure still remaining entombed. Had Kidd
concealed his plunder for a time, and afterward reclaimed it, the rumors would scarcely have reached us in
their presently unvarying form. You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about
money-finders. Had the pirate recovered his money, there the affair would have dropped. It seemed to me
that some accident--say the loss of a memorandum indicating its locality--had deprived him of the means
of recovering it, and that this accident had become known to his followers, who otherwise might never have
heard that treasure had been concealed at all, and who, busying themselves in vain, because unguided,
attempts to regain it, had given first birth, and then universal currency, to the reports which are now so
common. Have you ever heard of any important treasure being unearthed along the coast?"
"Never."
"But that Kidd's accumulations were immense, is well known. I took it for granted, therefore, that the earth
still held them; and you will scarcely be surprised when I tell you that I felt a hope, nearly amounting to
certainty, that the parchment so strangely found involved a lost record of the place of deposit."
"But how did you proceed?"
"I held the vellum again to the fire, after increasing the heat, but nothing appeared. I now thought it possible
that the coating of dirt might have something to do with the failure: so I carefully rinsed the parchment by
pouring warm water over it, and, having done this, I placed it in a tin pan, with the skull downward, and put
the pan upon a furnace of lighted charcoal. In a few minutes, the pan having become thoroughly heated, I
removed the slip, and, to my inexpressible joy, found it spotted, in several places, with what appeared to be
figures arranged in lines. Again I placed it in the pan, and suffered it to remain another minute. Upon taking it
off, the whole was just as you see it now."
Here Legrand, having re-heated the parchment, submitted it to my inspection. The following characters were
rudely traced, in a red tint, between the death's head and the goat:
"53##305))6*;4826)4#);806*;48+8P60))85;I#(;:#*8+83(88)5*+;46(;88*
96*?;8)*#(;485);5*+2:*#(;4956*2(5*--4)8P8*;4069285);)6+8)4##;I(#9;
48081;8:8#I;48+85;4)485+528806*8I(#9;48;(88;4(#?34;48)4#;161;:188 ;#?;"
"But," said I, returning him the slip, "I am as much in the dark as ever. Were all the jewels of Golconda
awaiting me upon my solution of this enigma, I am quite sure that I should be unable to earn them."
"And yet, "said Legrand, "the solution is by no means so difficult as you might be led to imagine from the
first hasty inspection of the characters. These characters, as any one might readily guess, form a cipher--that
is to say, they convey a meaning; but then from what is known of Kidd, I could not suppose him capable of
constructing any of the more abstruse cryptographs. I made up my mind, at once, that this was of a simple
species--such, however, as would appear to the crude intellect of the sailor, absolutely insoluble without the
key."
"And you really solved it?"
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 The Black Cat and Other Stories
"Readily; I have solved others of an abstruseness ten thousand times greater. Circumstances, and a certain
bias of mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human
ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application,
resolve. In fact, having once established connected and legible characters, I scarcely gave a thought to the
mere difficulty of developing their import.
"In the present case--indeed in all cases of secret writing--the first question regards the language of the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]