title: Monsieur Jonquelle : prefect of police of Paris
text: .A v 4^ * /M.^ Y » ° 0 s ^ r V^-o^/ x V*v^^ ^ o- > a° v v * Y * °/ > V * -V ATS ' S 'P J . . *• <? ca *• , V ♦ a s o 3 v V // C‘ \> ^ " <p V % °o G-. ■? , ^ •’"o o* = «■ O A, X > <$r '^U d- V & L V’ * 1 “ 0 *> > . ' N~ .<3 ^ _ -v A “ a. • _/T...; .<*^- >..... v • •' •>*. ....*,. ■i <J> * <>. v * o Cr ° a\ •>» NT V * «■ 9 * v # V V -v Cv / 'p ^ 0 o ® i ^ " ' V c »* , V * 0 N 0 , * 0 V . s s ' * c* V * v * 0 /■ ' «> is ^ *t£mb* ' *>. - r ^ » A. O t< ’V' ° o ^ ^ • S' ■» - A V y f) , A ^ ^0' < % <\ o° VV* -- j- '7'V O^ 1 *» jC (7 i//X/' ’>* $ © /w * A > * •* o o x * ^ ,0 o. * ■y \ y<> ^ si -t, > ^ V *- ^ 0 *“<S ' V y 0 * * A. « 0 0‘ , c ^ /A v '^s^vwinfe ’., 'p. <•»’ /mu///,** r c < " ^s/ 1 o 0 V V • ^ ^ ^ * V ’ K 0 ' v< ,*.,%*•" r ;/; o--;% *+#* -'mm,* %$ - ^ o a^v o ^ 'y Vi - * v? V * • v <-> ,> kg ^ ' V -5M//IBV—*. 1 * mw0s> + ... a ^ ^ V aV - if* << V , . o> ■/;> •" > ^ t «o o ^ o N V ^ * <^> ^ -t. '>**"*^a- . V . A '* AN "•> r <f>. Cp *» * ^ v „ @ v 0 o. * ^ '<<■ t ay “v 0 « X - A ^ •/« _ . * Xv s' ' /✓ ■ , » < £ si:'~*+ l "\£ v« ' a. ^ * z \\ X </> ° SV < •\ A* % V. 1 » 4 xO O v .0 ^ ■£?’ * qV '- ✓ C> f,° * ..cYArY „ X> > "° '%4 ■V ■ &*%. V * x°°« %atg>a. ./V 1 ' r: *.;/\-•. *o «, A * > A', <A><^ ? >«v * V’SSSSrV' ■ 'v "tW* „*v - ✓ - f- 7 ^ S ^ .v.«, ^ ’ /,° NC ^ % 14 A vX v" V ^ A* ° c. * * .\P * ** ,} o o x A7 S s '0CS 3 ^ "* (v ^*. <*• '*r%’* y- - %% o "'*'%• V p \p„ > * % # * </' ,^V <B 0 ? ^ '*© 0 o 4 'J -V ~0 •'-■ *” | ,, \'vN''i N ,,, *^°v'V/^’" ,, *v'^’ i * ,p A * ,#w3, * V* v, -A **>. CA Ar, .\Y ^ r .V ^ % * n <u *'♦. ,0^ e 0 N r; * ^ & r '>* a\ “" ^ V s ,A X <* c 1 * * v o iA X /y>2-, ^ V e •v- ms Jr //?, * A ^ 3 P V 3 ^ * Vi?* k * a p^.. 5 o 0 ' ^ * t *. N, \ X y ' •'^ / 1 ‘ *- '* - - ^ 0 v * o *" ^ « • A ^ \f° s * * r ^ # 3 h o J \ / ^ v 0 p ^ .0 .  5 W.A -V +a v : £Sm& * *° o’* x a. 4 1 . 4Hgt* - ^ rp 'V f\ ^ » 8 i \ * 4.° , * v0‘ s s ',, ^ V ^ A * <? A.V ^ cP .< V 0 v0 ? ' V-v \> - \ cP \ A x x x> x ,^ X * //""•A c . * ^ A - x' ' ^ > ,, ; #°* * * A A- '» •^." J o.^\X .. <X", r\V . 0 N t a ^> G° V f c . ,^ r f o i ' ~" v> ) .' , ‘»/ '> '' ,0". ■^. j$ ?€!t 3 b.\ A„> 4 ¥a; %. ,<£ *: MONSIEUR JONQUELLE PREFECT OF POLICE OF PARIS By MELVILLE DAVISSON POST MONSIEUR JONQUELLE: PREFECT OF POLICE OF PARIS THE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL¬ TEACHER THE SLEUTH OF ST. JAMES’S SQUARE THE MYSTERY AT THE BLUE VILLA UNCLE ABNER, MASTER OF MYSTERIES These Are Appleton Books D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Publishers New York j MONSIEUR JONQUELLE PREFECT OF POLICE OF PARIS BY MELVILLE DAVISSON POST AUTHOR OF “UNCLE ABNER,” “THE SLEUTH OF ST. JAMES’S SQUARE,” “THE MOUNTAIN SCHOOL-TEACHER,” ETC. D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIII V D. COPYRIGHT, IQ23, BY APPLETON AND COMPANY Copyright, 19 is. by The Star Company Copyright, 1922, by The Pictorial Review Company Copyright, 1922, by The Crowell Publishing Company Copyright, 1913, 1918, by The Curtis Publishing Company Copyright, 1921, by The Consolidated Magazines Corporatiow (The Red Book Magazine) PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA OCT -4 1923 -1 ©C1A76017 4 CONTENTS CHAPTER TAGS I. The Great Cipher .i II. Found in the Fog.28 III. The Alien Corn.47 IV. The Ruined Eye.96 V. The Haunted Door. 113 VI. Blucher's March.136 VII. The Woman on the Terrace . . . 157 VIII. The Triangular Hypothesis . . . 177 IX. The Problem of the Five Marks . . 198 X. The Man with Steel Fingers . . . 220 XI. The Mottled Butterfly.244 XII. The Girl with the Ruby .... 268 MONSIEUR JONQUELLE PREFECT OF POLICE OF PARIS I .—The Great Cipher It was a night of illusions. The whole world was unreal. The city could not be seen. There was a sort of fairy vista extending over the! gardens across the bit of park into the haze, pierced by the narrow white shaft of the Na¬ tional Monument extending into the sky. There was a heavy odor of jessamine and honeysuckle lying about the southern portico of the Executive Mansion. But there were no lights. The whole of the portico was in heavy shadow. A big, strong, masculine voice, culti¬ vated and firm, was speaking. “I am glad that business of your embassy brought you to America, Monsieur Jonquelle,” it said, “because I wanted to ask you about that last expedition of Chauvannesh I knew Chau- vannes in South Africa. He was a first-class man. What was the mystery about his death? The current report at the time could not have been the truth. It was too fantastic.” i Monsieur Jonquelle One might have made out the figure of the Frenchman by looking closely in the dim light. He sat in a long chair, his legs extended, a cigarette, unlighted, moving in his fingers. His voice was low and clear when he spoke, like one engaged with a reflection. “It was all the truth, Excellency,” he said, “as we now know.” The big voice interrupted: “That fantastic story!” The Frenchman’s voice did not change. “The truth about it,” he said, “is even more fantastic than the current story of the time. No¬ body believed it. Nobody could have believed it. When his journal finally came in, everybody thought Chauvannes had gone mad before the end. The things he wrote down simply could not have happened!” He paused. “But it was every word the truth. . . . There are the emeralds in the Louvre.” The big man beyond Monsieur Jonquelle, ob¬ scured by the thick shadow, made an exclama¬ tion of astonishment. “The emeralds,” he said, “are of course proof of the fact that Chauvannes found some evi¬ dences of the thing he was after. But his journal could not have been the truth. The man who wrote the closing pages of that journal must have been mad.” 2 The Great Cipher The Frenchman replied with no change in his voice. “Excellency,” he said, “the man who wrote the closing pages of that journal was not only sane, but he was so clever that I have never ceased to admire him. He was in a desperate position, from which, he knew perfectly well, there was no escape, and he undertook to do a thing that not only required the soundest intelli¬ gence, but it also required a degree of cleverness that has not been equaled by anybody. I feel that I ought to stand and uncover whenever I think about Chauvannes.” There was a sound in the darkness as of one drawing one’s body swiftly together in a chair. There was a sort of booming in the big voice. “You amaze me!” it said. “Of course, I knew what Chauvannes was after. He used to talk about it when we were shooting on the Vaal. He had the clue, he thought, to a lost civiliza¬ tion of an immense age, in the great wilderness of Central Africa, a little north of the Congo. The old route of the ivory raiders had touched it. And there were the stories the slavel traders had brought out, and so forth. I thought at the time that he was building on insufficient data, but one never knows what civilization may have flourished on any portion of the earth’s surface. An immense wilderness laid down over it would 3 Monsieur Jonquelle mean nothing. The race is much older than we imagine.” He continued to speak in his strong, firm voice: “I was not surprised that Chauvannes found some evidence of the thing he was looking for. He was a first-class archeologist. He knew all about everything of the sort that had been un¬ covered. And he was a good, all-around ex¬ plorer, none better. If there was any man in the world who could have gone from the Congo across the old trail of the ivory raiders, north¬ east to the Albert Nyanza, it was Chauvannes. I can believe that Chauvannes went in there, and that he found the evidences of the thing he was looking for; but the journal that the survivor of the expedition brought in could not be true. Chauvannes was insane when he wrote it—if the excerpts I saw of it were not colored. One could easily go mad at the end of an adventure like that. It was an appalling thing to undertake. That forest lies on the equator. It is very nearly three thousand miles across it. There is every conceiv¬ able peril in it. One would look for a man to come out on the Nyanza mad, if he ever did come out.” Monsieur Jonquelle replied in the same even voice. “Our government, Excellency,” he said, “was 4 The Great Cipher precisely of your opinion, when the journal finally came in. They thought Chauvannes was mad at the end. But he was not mad! He was sane and clever—how sane and how clever you will realize when you get the whole thing clearly in your mind. It was a long time before we understood it, although how we could have been so stupid seems to me now a greater wonder than the fantastic incidents with which Chauvannes filled the closing pages of his journal. “I think the first clue we got was the method Chauvannes had taken to be sure that the journal would get into Paris after his death. His direc¬ tion, written on the back of it, was that the bearer who brought it in should be paid five thousand francs by the executors of his estate. You see he was offering a reward for the thing to get in. “Only one of the three men that Chauvannes constantly speaks of in his journal ever appeared. One can imagine what happened to the other t wo —the same thing, doubtless, that happened to all the persons who started with Chauvannes northeast to the Nyanza after he had abandoned his excavations.” The big man beyond Monsieur Jonquelle in the dark seemed to have composed himself to listen. He was silent, and Monsieur Jonquelle went on: “These men, who were the only persons alive with Chauvannes when he finally reached the Ituri 5 Monsieur Jonquelle on the morning of the seventeenth of December, must have been three of the most desperate adven¬ turers in the world. They were evidently broken men at the end of their tether, willing to stake everything on a last chance, or they would not have joined Chauvannes. They were not men he selected. He never would have selected men of this character. They seem to have followed him in and to have literally annexed themselves to his expedition when he left the Congo east of the Leopold. They must have been an exquisite devil’s guard—those three; the little wolf-faced Apache, Leturc, the Finn sailor, and the American beach comber they called Captain Dix. “The Apache was the one who came in with the journal. He must have been, after all, what you would call the ‘best man’ of the three. Neverthe¬ less it was these three hell birds who came out alive with Chauvannes. And what he had to say about them is on every page of the journal. He must have changed his mind very shortly after they joined him, because the first impressions he wrote down, which were probably what our own would have been, were afterward scratched out. We might have believed that some one else had made these erasures but for the fact that the journal from this time on never fails to speak of these three men in the highest terms. Their tire¬ lessness, their energy, their courage, their devo- 6 4 The Great Cipher tion to Chauvannes is the one note that continues through this journal to the end. “Of course, one could say that as these three men had to depend on Chauvannes to bring them out, the presence of a common peril would have united them in his support, and that while they were apparently exerting themselves for him, they were, in fact, laboring to get out of that wilderness alive. “They were evidently densely ignorant persons of a low order. The Finn and the American beach comber had no education whatever; Leturc could read—he was a deserter, we think, from the Foreign Legion—and he had a sort of devil’s shrewdness. But he was no match, when it came to wits, for Chauvannes. None of them were. They were ignorant and superstitious. But they were determined, desperate to the last degree, and afraid of nothing. “One of the features of the journal that first impressed me was the fact that Chauvannes had no illusions about these men. He understood each of them perfectly. He pinned the success of his great plan to an accurate conception of the Apache, Leturc. He thought this desperate human creature was what you would call the ‘best man.’ He expected him to come out the best man, and he laid the plan he had in mind to fit that 7 Monsieur Jonquelle eventuality. And he was right. I saw that when I got to thinking about the journal. “And I saw something else. I saw that Chau- vannes realized his own situation pretty early in the march of events. He knew what he was going into. And he knew where the thing would lead. He realized it a long way ahead. This fact, as I have said, was one of the conspicuous features of the journal. I suppose one, in an incipient mad¬ ness, might realize all the accurate features of the situation that lay about Chauvannes, and before him, as he did; but I doubt it. I think only a man sound and sane could have seen it with the cer¬ tainty that Chauvannes saw it, and at the distance beyond the event. Only the soundest intelligence, in the calm control of every faculty, could have realized that the thing before him was inevitable. A man in any other state of mind would have undertaken to delude himself. He would have resorted to futile devices, or to some tragic issue before the end, or to some vain hope. It took a mind like Chauvannes’, profoundly sane, to see that the thing that awaited him was inevitable ! “I studied that journal as closely as a cipher dispatch. The evidences of Chauvannes’ mental condition did not appear until the entries begin¬ ning about the seventeenth of December—the day on which they finally came out of the forest on the old elephant trail. Of course, strange things 8 Tlie Great Cipher had happened before that—the decimation of the force, for one thing. But Chauvannes never seemed to attribute this to any but a natural cause, a sort of united plan of the dwarf camps to destroy the members of the expedition. “He found that whole, awful wilderness veined through with these camps, precisely as Stanley found it when he was following the Ituri in his effort to relieve Emin Pasha. And Chauvannes seems to have had precisely the same experiences as Stanley, in that the poisoned arrows, which the dwarf tribes used, were always fatal to the natives, but not to the white men of the expedition. At least, the three white men with Chauvannes, and the explorer himself, always escaped, while the persistent destruction of the other members of the expedition continued until only Chauvannes and the other white men came out alive. “Chauvannes, like other men who have been into the Congo, tried to find out what the poison was that these dwarfs used, but he had no more success at it than Stanley. He thought the fact that white men did not die of this poison, as Stan¬ ley’s expedition demonstrated, may have, perhaps, convinced these hostile tribes that a white man could not be so destroyed, and was the reason why they directed their attacks against the natives of the expedition and not against the four white men who conducted it. The explanation seems pos- 9 Monsieur Jonquelle sible. It seemed intelligent to Chauvannes, for he makes it very clear in his journal that this is his belief. He gives it as the reason why all the mem¬ bers of the expedition finally perished except the four members of it who were white. “The expedition was not large. It was as small as Chauvannes could get on with. He never in¬ tended it to be more than a scouting party, to lay out the thing he was looking for. The discovery of the emeralds was a sort of accident in remov¬ ing the portion of an ancient wall that an uprooted tree had dislodged.” There was a moment’s silence. Then Monsieur Jonquelle went on: “Of course, the average person, accustomed to adventure tales, has a fantastic notion about these hostile natives. But there is in fact nothing fan¬ tastic about them. The whole of this immense forest, lying above the equator, is inhabited by these tribes, and their furtive attacks with poi¬ soned weapons, usually at night, are well known to everybody. Stanley’s whole expedition was constantly menaced by them. You will see his map dotted all over with their camps. They are no fairy creatures of romance. They are a con¬ stantly menacing, actual peril in the Congo. “Chauvannes saw nothing strange or mysteri¬ ous about what happened to the native members of his expedition. His journal is clear on that. io The Great Cipher I said a while ago that the incredible things set out in the journal did not begin to appear until about the seventeenth of December, when they had finally come out. It is true that some indica¬ tory things are noted in the journal before that date. Chauvannes could not sleep. He returns again and again to this fact. Bromides did no good. He continues to complain about the failure of the bromides. He wonders if the drugs have lost their virtue, or if they could not have been pure. He notes that he tested this with one of the other men and observed the effect. The bromides were all right. This fact gave him a good deal of concern. He could not sleep. And the drugs upon which the medical profession depends in such a case, failed. “We find this feature in considerable detail and beginning some time before December 17 while the expedition was still in the forest of the Congo, in its awful march to the northeast. It could have been nothing short of awful in every conception of the word. The whole of that vast wdderness is a kingdom of Satan. We never can get any adequate realization of it—a horror of gloom and rain, the heavens shut out nearly all the time by the tree tops, the whole earth under¬ neath a bog, every form of creeper, of vermin, of reptile, the stench of a rotten world, and this invisible enemy that never relented and never tired Monsieur Jonquelle out. It was enough to break down the morale of anybody. No wonder Chauvannes couldn’t sleep ! But it never did break down his morale—that’s precisely what I am going to make clear to you not even when he saw, with an almost uncanny second sight, what was inevitably ahead of him. “I don’t know when it was that Chauvannes realized what was ahead of him, but as I have said, I think he saw it almost from the first day of the march north. “I studied that journal word by word and sen¬ tence by sentence. I felt at the time that no one of us understood it, that the thing meant some¬ thing which ought to appear if we were able to grasp a proper conception of it. I felt before it as I used to feel before those clever German dis¬ patches, which appeared on their faces to be merely a narrative of a domestic incident, when they were in fact army orders containing a definite direction. I was right, as events proved, but the government authorities in Paris at the time con¬ sidered my notion fantastic. “Still, as I have said, the strange digressions in his journal did not begin to appear until about the seventeenth of December, when they came out on to the great grass-covered plateau outlined to the east by a low mountain range, beneath which lay Lake Albert Nyanza. As it happened, they had come out ten days ahead of the date which 12 The Great Cipher they had determined upon for the arrival of the lake boat. It was to receive the expedition at the same point on the Nyanza that Stanley met Emin Pasha. ‘Now, here was another indicatory point. They did not go ahead to the Nyanza as Stanley had done. They camped on a grassy slope;—it looked like an English lawn, Chauvannes said— within the first day’s march out of the forest. Here they remained. “Chauvannes had all the modern implements that an explorer carries with him, and he laid down the exact location of this camp with the most painstaking accuracy. It was charted in the jour¬ nal in half a dozen different forms and checked in every variety of way. He seemed to have spent a lot of time at this. He was determined that the exact spot of this camp should be definitely located for all time and beyond any possibility of error. And he did not fail. The exact location of that camp is as certain as any boundary monument on our Belgian frontier. It can be located to-day within the error of half a meter. He had plenty of time for this, because he remained in this camp with Leturc while the other men went on to the Nyanza. “The route to the lake could now be laid out to the eye. It was directly below a marked rocky promontory of the sky line. But the men with 13 Monsieur Jonquelle Chauvannes thought it better to be certain of the way out, and as they had to put in the time until the boat arrived, it seemed advisable to go over the route. The American beach comber, Dix, and the Finn set out for the Albert, Leturc remaining in the camp with Chauvannes. “Chauvannes seemed in the journal to take a certain care to justify this course. He was now alarmed about his condition. The camp was in a spot little less than heavenly after the awful for¬ est of the Congo. It was a rolling country of bright green pasture land, veined with an outline of trees, its hilltops studded with thickets beyond which lay to the east the range of mountains rim¬ ming the Nyanza. It was simply a paradise after the horror of the vast wilderness to the southwest of it. Birds were everywhere. It was a glorious country, full of antelope, eland, buffalo and the like. It was no trouble for a hunter to supply a camp. “It was here alone with Leturc that Chauvan¬ nes finished the journal, which I finally deciphered, as one might say, at the Service de la Surete in Paris. “I have said that the only thing indicating Chauvannes’ condition before the seventeenth of December, when they came out on the old elephant track into this heavenly country below the Albert, was the fact that he could not sleep and that the 14 The Great Cipher bromides had failed him. But this was not pre¬ cisely all. The journal began to indicate a state of mind in Chauvannes that he apparently hesi¬ tated a long time to record, the impression that they were approaching some sort of creature of which they had very little, if any, dependable information. “That statement seems vague, but the impres¬ sion upon which it is founded in the journal is in itself vague. It was, to put it plainly, a feeling that some strange creatures were ahead of him. Now, one could have understood this, if it had been the feeling that these creatures were follow¬ ing the expedition, for the hostile dwarfs had, in fact, followed it until they had destroyed, as I have said, every member of the expedition except the four white men. But it was not this peril that seemed to affect Chauvannes; this was a thing of which he was aware and which he could under¬ stand; but the vague fear of the creatures on in front of him was a new conception. “Chauvannes said that he could not dismiss this impression and that it increased as he advanced, attaining to a definite certainty of apprehension at about the time they came out into the grass land west of the Albert. “At first Chauvannes put this down as an illu¬ sion arising from the depression of insomnia. But 15 Monsieur Jonquelle he began to speak of it later as a sort of definite premonition to be reckoned with. “Of course, when the journal first came into our possession, we took this, and the incredible things that followed, to be merely the illusions of a man whose nervous system had broken down. This was a profound error. Every statement follow¬ ing in the journal was, as it proved, of the most definite importance. One got here at this point in the journal a pretty clear conception of the con¬ dition of Chauvannes at the time. “The three with him, whose care, devotion and untiring solicitude are, as I have said, the persist¬ ent note of this latter part of Chauvannes’ journal, were now very much concerned about him. They seemed to understand the danger, to himself, of one in such a mental state, for they secured and destroyed all the ammunition to the private weapons which Chauvannes carried; they even broke the blades of the knives. They appeared to realize that a homicidal seizure might develop from such a mental condition, and they seemed to fear that it might take the course of a suicidal mania. They were wholly without fear for them¬ selves, as Chauvannes’ journal repeats over and over again. “It is here, now, at this point, that the whole journal of Chauvannes’ begins to be taken up with the extraordinary things that he observed. The 16 The Great Cipher impression of some strange creatures close on the camp, in the neighborhood, became an obsession. One can tell that from the speculations with which the pages of the journal are filled at this point, as though the man were endeavoring to lay down an argument in order to support an impression which he felt certain was sound, but which he was also certain would appear fantastic to all other persons. Were men justified in the belief that the exceedingly narrow limits of their crude senses could give them a knowledge of all the creatures that might inhabit the world? He continues to reflect upon the limitation of the senses; the eye was easily deceived; the ear was wholly undepend¬ able; the sense of scent in a human being was absurd beside that of the most inferior animal, and all feeling was confined to a sense of touch infinitely crude. Was it not then ridiculous to assume, depending on such limited agencies, that one could have any large conception of what even the limited area of the world close about him contained? “There are a dozen pages of this speculation closely written in the journal, following the in¬ somnia and what we at first took to be the halluci¬ nation which possessed Chauvannes at the time. They bring us up to the strange events which he began now to set down in detail. “This was all mental. It was all what one 17 Monsieur Jonquelle would call { a state of the mind.’ The physical evidences began now to appear. “It was on the first night in the new camp after they had emerged from the forest that Chauvan- nes had a sensation, as he puts it, of something delicately feeling over his face. It seemed to be a very slight, moving touch, as of the tip of a feather, but it was clearly distinguishable. The man put up his hand and made a swift gesture in the darkness about him, but there was absolutely nothing that he could touch. He says that this thing happened more than once in the night, and each time, although he put out his hand instantly, it came in contact with no physical evidences of any creature about him. “This was before Dix and the Finn had set out to go over the route to the Albert. Chauvannes says that he spoke to the men ‘guardedly,’ as he puts it, about this experience on the day that fol¬ lowed it, but they had observed nothing. There had certainly been no sound in the tent; nor was there any track or evidence of the fact that any creature had been in it. “The thing occurred again the next night. On this occasion Chauvannes distinctly felt that swift, lingering touch pass over his face; and again, in¬ stantly, he clutched about him in the dark, beating the whole place with his arms in a desperate effort to come into some physical contact with the crea- 18 The Great Cipher ture. But it was wholly to no purpose. He touched nothing. There was no sound anywhere, and the men sleeping about him in the tent were not disturbed. He says that on the following morning he mentioned this thing again, but the three men with him had no experience of it what¬ ever. “If these creatures, of which Chauvannes had the strange premonitory sense, had finally ap¬ peared, they seemed to be directing their atten¬ tions exclusively to him. At any rate, the men denied having been disturbed by anything. They had seen nothing, felt nothing. But they were disturbed about Chauvannes. “And it was on this day, it seems, that they took the precaution about his weapons. They also de¬ cided that the Frenchman Leturc should remain with Chauvannes all the time to see that nothing happened to him. The journal makes it clear that this precaution was taken, with the idea that Chauvannes in his present mental condition might do some injury to himself, rather than in the notion that he was menaced by any mysterious creature. “And they followed that plan. Dix and the Finn set out to go to Albert Nyanza, and Leturc remained with Chauvannes. “It was on the third night, after the two men had departed and he was alone in the tent with 19 Monsieur Jonquelle the sleeping Leturc, that Chauvannes saw this creature. He says it was about three o’clock in the morning. He had been awake through the entire night, his eyes usually closed. He does not know how he happened to open them, but he did open them. It was precisely seventeen minutes to three, by the watch which he wore on his wrist. He knew this because it was a night of full moon, the brilliant rays of which entered the tent through the half-opened flap. There was abso¬ lutely no sound to have attracted Chauvannes’ attention, and no other physical evidence of the presence of the creature that he was at the time aware of. But at any rate, he opened his eyes practically at the moment when the creature entered the tent—a thing it did without disturbing the flap and without making any sound whatever. “Chauvannes says that he saw it distinctly. It paused for a moment after it had entered, remain¬ ing for some seconds quite motionless. He says that in proportion to the other parts of the crea¬ ture’s body, the head was enormous. It was cubical in contour. The outline was perfectly clear, but what we would call features were hardly distinguishable. The thing seemed to lack fea¬ tures. That was one of the distinguishing horrors of it—a head big in proportion to its body, cubical in outline and lacking features! The chest and the abdomen were also big, estimating the creature 20 The Great Cipher by its own proportions. The limbs were long, nar¬ row and jointed. The whole creature was of a repulsive, reddish color, and without any of the usual covering of animals with which the human race is familiar. The body seemed to be of some hard red substance, Chauvannes said—frozen and polished flesh, after the skin had been re¬ moved, was the idea he got. “The creature remained only a moment visible to him; then it disappeared. It seemed to Chau¬ vannes that it disappeared merely by turning about. He was unable to see it again, although the doorway where it entered was clear in the moonlight, and there was only the grass floor of the tent.” Monsieur Jonquelle stopped here in his narra¬ tive, like one who would wish a hearer to grasp the whole conception of the story before he went on. But he did not seek a comment. The man beyond him waited for him to go on, and he pres¬ ently continued: “I shall not follow the detail of all the expe¬ riences noted down by Chauvannes, and which, finally, brought him to the conclusions at which he at length arrived. He was able, after this night, to observe the creature and a number of its com¬ panions, although the man Leturc, who was al¬ ways with him, seems never to have observed it. 21 Monsieur Jonquelle Chauvannes got a profound impression of the creatures. They constantly gave him the idea of intelligence separated from any human feeling. He got also the impression that they were blind— at least in the sense that we understand blindness. That they had some other sense which was equal, if not superior, to the sense we call sight, was, he thought, clearly evident. “He was also able to discover, although he does not give all the details of that discovery in the journal, that these creatures lived underground, and that one of their underground cities was very close to the camp. He had, in fact, by some sinis¬ ter hazard, put down his camp almost at the door¬ way of the underground habitat of these extraor¬ dinary beings—if one could call a creature of this character a being in our sense. “I suppose it was these conceptions of the Thing that caused Chauvannes to note in his journal a parallel in our modern fiction—the story of the Englishman Wells, about an underground creature, a degenerate of the human race, living in the darkness of a subterranean world and sup¬ porting itself on the flesh of the surface remnant of that race grown lovely and effeminate! “Chauvannes in his journal did not draw a parallel. But he noted the details of this story, which he had read, as of something that occurred to him after he had actually discovered the crea- 22 The Great Cipher tures, of which he had come out of the forest of the Congo with that dominating premonition. “Now, these are among the distinguishing inci¬ dents of Chauvannes’ journal that led Your Excel¬ lency, and the Paris authorities, to believe that Chauvannes was mad. The culmination of events seemed to establish it. “You know how the journal goes on, giving the minute details that Chauvannes observed during the week that he was alone with Leturc, while the American beach comber, Dix, and the Finn made their journey to the Nyanza. And you know how Chauvannes finally came to the conclusion that the seven great emeralds, which he carried sewed up in the lining of his waistcoat, were the things that set these creatures on him. “The emeralds are in the Louvre. They are seven of the most extraordinary jewels in the world. They are larger and purer than any other known emerald. They are cut in a manner of which we have no knowledge, and the backs of them are covered with a hieroglyphic writing that antedates any language that we know, and which, so far, has baffled every effort to translate. “At any rate, although the Frenchman Leturc was with Chauvannes all the time—was, in fact, guarding him all the time—and although he was never at any time more than a dozen meters from the door of the tent, and although no sound was 23 Monsieur Jonquelle ever heard, no violence was ever offered to any¬ thing, no track was ever seen, no act was ever done of which Chauvannes had any knowledge, or the guard Leturc had any knowledge—in spite of all this, on the very day before the return of Dix and the Finn, the emeralds disappeared! “Chauvannes wrote it down in detail in the journal. “He was certain, accurate, without any trace of doubt; the emeralds—no longer in his possession —were in the underground habitat of these crea¬ tures! And the opening to this habitat was close beside the very place of the camp. “It was hardly any wonder that the men with him considered him mad, especially when one reads the closing pages of the journal. He takes, in writing, an elaborate and tender farewell of the three men. He thanks them in detail for their courage, their unfailing kindness to him and their devotion to the expedition. No man could have written a higher testimonial of the fidelity of his companions. He points out that his death is im¬ pending and certain. He begs that the journal may be carried to France, and he urges the French government to send out an expedition to recover the emeralds, which, he says, are concealed in the first underground dwelling of the creatures, which he has described, as though he were aware of the fact that there were other dwellings of these crea- 24 The Great Cipher tures about. The emeralds are In the one closest to the camp, and they can be recovered! He is insistent on this point, as he is insistent on the fact that his death is near and inevitable, and as he is insistent on the fidelity of the three men with him. “And when on the following day, as Leturc reported, he seized the Finn’s rifle and shot him¬ self, the men were, of course, convinced that he was mad.” There came a sudden vigor into Monsieur Jon- quelle’s voice. “But he was not mad! Don’t you see, Excel¬ lency, that the whole narrative of the journal was an immense cipher? Don’t you see what the man was doing?” The voice beyond Monsieur Jonquelle, in the darkness of the portico, boomed in a sudden big expletive. There was the sound of a doubled fist crashed into the palm of a hand. “Wonderful!” he cried. “It’s clever beyond words. Good God! Think of the man in that deadly position working out a clever thing like that. He knew what was going to happen to him. He knew it as soon as he picked up those jewels under the overturned stones on the Congo. He knew he would never come out alive, and he worked out the cipher in this journal to show where the emeralds were concealed, so the French 25 Monsieur Jonquelle authorities could recover them. And he worked out all the details to be sure that the journal would finally get into Paris. It’s wonderful! It’s amaz¬ ing-” He beat his leg with his big hand, thumping it as one might thump grist in a bag. “I never dreamed that that was what the man was after. I thought he was mad!” “Surely,” replied Monsieur Jonquelle. “It was the first impression of everybody. But he was not mad. He was merely making a great cipher with all the details of this journal—a cipher that would deceive the three men who had already killed off all the natives in his expedition, and who had determined to murder him after they were certain that they could reach the Albert Nyanza! A cipher that would so completely deceive them, by bearing on its face the proof of their innocence and of his own madness, that they would be care¬ ful to get it to the French authorities as a justi¬ fication of themselves! “He knew there was no chance that he would ever come out alive! But he wished to rob these assassins of the treasure which they coveted, and he wished the record of his expedition and these incomparable emeralds to reach France. He therefore prepared a journal in which was con¬ cealed, as in a code, all the actual facts connected with his expedition and his assassination, and at 2 6 The Great Ciph er the same time would disclose the place in which the emeralds were concealed. It would also bring the assassins to that justice which they deserved. 