In spite of this denial, Fragoso pushed back the man who guarded the entrance, and with a bound threw himself into the judge’s study.
“I come from the province where Torres pursued his calling as captain of the woods!” he gasped. “Mr. Judge, Torres told the truth. Stop—stop the execution?”
“You found the gang?”
“Yes.”
“And you have brought me the cipher of the document?”
Fragoso did not reply.
“Come, leave me alone! leave me alone!” shouted Jarriquez, and, a prey to an outburst of rage, he grasped the document to tear it to atoms.
Fragoso seized his hands and stopped him. “The truth is there!” he said.
“I know,” answered Jarriquez; “but it is a truth which will never see the light!”
“It will appear—it must! it must!”
“Once more, have you the cipher?”
“No,” replied Fragoso; “but, I repeat, Torres has not lied. One of his companions, with whom he was very intimate, died a few months ago, and there can be no doubt but that this man gave him the document he came to sell to Joam Dacosta.”
“No,” answered Jarriquez—“no, there is no doubt about it—as far as we are concerned; but that is not enough for those who dispose of the doomed man’s life. Leave me!”
Fragoso, repulsed, would not quit the spot. Again he threw himself at the judge’s feet. “Joam Dacosta is innocent!” he cried; “you will not leave him to die? It was not he who committed the crime of Tijuco; it was the comrade of Torres, the author of that document! It was Ortega!”
As he uttered the name the judge bounded backward. A kind of calm swiftly succeeded to the tempest which raged within him. He dropped the document from his clenched hand, smoothed it out on the table, sat down, and, passing his hand over his eyes—“That name?” he said—“Ortega? Let us see,” and then he proceeded with the new name brought back by Fragoso as he had done with the other names so vainly tried by himself.
After placing it above the first six letters of the paragraph he obtained the following formula:
| O | r | t | e | g | a |
| P | h | y | j | s | l |
“Nothing!” he said. “That gives us—nothing!”
And in fact the h placed under the r could not be expressed by a cipher, for, in alphabetical order, this letter occupies an earlier position to that of the r.
The p, the y, the j, arranged beneath the letters o, t, e, disclosed the cipher 1, 4, 5, but as for the s and the l at the end of the word, the interval which separated them from the g and the a was a dozen letters, and hence impossible to express by a single cipher, so that they corresponded to neither g nor a.
And here appalling shouts arose in the streets; they were the cries of despair.
Fragoso jumped to one of the windows, and opened it before the judge could hinder him.
The people filled the road. The hour had come at which the doomed man was to start from the prison, and the crowd was flowing back to the spot where the gallows had been erected.
Judge Jarriquez, quite frightful to look upon, devoured the lines of the document with a fixed stare.
“The last letters!” he muttered. “Let us try once more the last letters!”
It was the last hope.
And then, with a hand whose agitation nearly prevented him from writing at all, he placed the name of Ortega over the six last letters of the paragraph, as he had done over the first.
An exclamation immediately escaped him. He saw, at first glance, that the six last letters were inferior in alphabetical order to those which composed Ortega’s name, and that consequently they might yield the number.
And when he reduced the formula, reckoning each later letter from the earlier letter of the word, he obtained.
| O | r | t | e | g | a |
| 4 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 3 |
| S | u | v | j | h | d |
The number thus disclosed was 432513.
But was this number that which had been used in the document? Was it not as erroneous as those he had previously tried?
At this moment the shouts below redoubled—shouts of pity which betrayed the sympathy of the excited crowd. A few minutes more were all that the doomed man had to live!
Fragoso, maddened with grief, darted from the room! He wished to see, for the last time, his benefactor who was on the road to death! He longed to throw himself before the mournful procession and stop it, shouting, “Do not kill this just man! do not kill him!”
But already Judge Jarriquez had placed the given number above the first letters of the paragraph, repeating them as often as was necessary, as follows:
| 4 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 5 | 1 | 3 |
| P | h | y | j | s | l | y | d | d | q | f | d | z | x | g | a | s | g | z | z | q | q | e | h |
And then, reckoning the true letters according to their alphabetical order, he read:
“Le véritable auteur du vol de—”
A yell of delight escaped him! This number, 432513, was the number sought for so long! The name of Ortega had enabled him to discover it! At length he held the key of the document, which would incontestably prove the innocence of Joam Dacosta, and without reading any more he flew from his study into the street, shouting:
“Halt! Halt!”
To cleave the crowd, which opened as he ran, to dash to the prison, whence the convict was coming at the last moment, with his wife and children clinging to him with the violence of despair, was but the work of a minute for Judge Jarriquez.
Stopping before Joam Dacosta, he could not speak for a second, and then these words escaped his lips:
“Innocent! Innocent!”
XIX
The Crime of Tijuco
On the arrival of the judge the mournful procession halted. A roaring echo had repeated after him and again repeated the cry which escaped from every mouth:
“Innocent! Innocent!”
Then complete silence fell on all. The people did not want to lose one syllable of what was about to be proclaimed.
Judge Jarriquez sat down on a stone seat, and then, while Minha, Benito, Manoel, and Fragoso stood round him, while Joam Dacosta clasped Yaquita to his heart, he first unraveled the last paragraph of the document by means of the number, and as
