The blue scarab
and passed a full tumbler down to Thorndyke. But before resuming my
labours I picked up the telescope and once more inspected the
farm-house. The window was still open, but the watcher had apparently
become bored with the not very thrilling spectacle. At any rate he had
disappeared.
From this time onward every few minutes brought some discovery. First,
a pair of deeply rusted steel shoe buckles; then one or two buttons,
and presently a fine gold watch with a fob-chain and a bunch of seals,
looking uncannily new and fresh and seeming more fraught with tragedy
than even the bones themselves. In his cautious digging, Thorndyke was
careful not to disturb the skeleton; and looking down into the narrow
trench that was growing from the corner of the pit, I could see both
legs, with only the right foot missing, projecting from the miniature
cliff. Meanwhile our part of the trench was deepening rapidly, so that
Thorndyke presently warned us to stop digging and bade us come down
and shovel away the earth as he disengaged it.
At length the whole skeleton, excepting the head, was uncovered,
though it lay undisturbed as it might have lain in its coffin. And
now, as Thorndyke picked away the earth around the head, we could see
that the skull was propped forward as if it rested on a high pillow. A
little more careful probing with the pick-point served to explain this
appearance. For as the earth fell away and disclosed the grinning
skull, there came into view the edge and iron-bound corners of a small
chest.
It was an impressive spectacle; weird, solemn and rather dreadful.
There for over a century the ill-fated gambler had lain, his
mouldering head pillowed on the booty of unrecorded villainy, booty
that had been won by fraud, retrieved by violence, and hidden at last
by the final winner with the witness of his crime.
“Here is a fine text for a moralist who would preach on the vanity of
riches,” said Thorndyke.
We all stood silent for a while, gazing, not without awe, at the stark
figure that lay guarding the ill-gotten treasure. Miss Blowgrave--who
had been helped down when we descended--crept closer to her father and
murmured that it was “rather awful”; while Blowgrave himself displayed
a queer mixture of exultation and shuddering distaste.
Suddenly the silence was broken by a voice from above, and we all
looked up with a start. A youngish man was standing on the brink of
the pit, looking down on us with very evident disapproval.
“It seems that I have come just in the nick of time,” observed the
new-comer. “I shall have to take possession of that chest, you know,
and of the remains, too, I suppose. That is my ancestor, Reuben
Blowgrave.”
“Well, Harold,” said Blowgrave, “you can have Uncle Reuben if you want
him. But the chest belongs to Nellie.”
Here Mr. Harold Bowker--I recognized him now as the watcher from the
window--dropped down into the pit and advanced with something of a
swagger.
“I am Reuben’s heir,” said he, “through my Uncle Arthur, and I take
possession of this property and the remains.”
“Pardon me, Harold,” said Blowgrave, “but Nellie is Arthur’s residuary
legatee, and this is the residue of the estate.”
“Rubbish!” exclaimed Bowker. “By the way, how did you find out where
he was buried?”
“Oh, that was quite simple,” replied Thorndyke with unexpected
geniality. “I’ll show you the plan.” He climbed up to the surface and
returned in a few moments with the three tracings and his letter-case.
“This is how we located the spot.” He handed the plan marked No. 3 to
Bowker, who took it from him and stood looking at it with a puzzled
frown.
“But this isn’t the place,” he said at length.
“Isn’t it?” queried Thorndyke. “No, of course; I’ve given you the
wrong one. This is the plan.” He handed Bowker the plan marked No. 1,
and took the other from him, laying it down on a heap of earth. Then,
as Bowker pored gloomily over No. 1, he took a knife and a pencil from
his pocket, and with his back to our visitor, scraped the lead of the
pencil, letting the black powder fall on the plan that he had just
laid down. I watched him with some curiosity; and when I observed that
the black scrapings fell on two spots near the edges of the paper, a
sudden suspicion flashed into my mind, which was confirmed when I saw
him tap the paper lightly with his pencil, gently blow away the
powder, and quickly producing my photograph of the typewritten letter
from his case, hold it for a moment beside the plan.
“This is all very well,” said Bowker, looking up from the plan, “but
how did you find out about these bearings?”
Thorndyke swiftly replaced the letter in his case, and turning round,
replied, “I am afraid I can’t give you any further information.”
“Can’t you, indeed!” Bowker exclaimed insolently. “Perhaps I shall
compel you to. But, at any rate, I forbid any of you to lay hands on
my property.”
Thorndyke looked at him steadily and said in an ominously quiet tone:
“Now, listen to me, Mr. Bowker. Let us have an end of this nonsense.
You have played a risky game and you have lost. How much you have lost
I can’t say until I know whether Mr. Blowgrave intends to prosecute.”
“To prosecute!” shouted Bowker. “What the deuce do you mean by
prosecute?”
“I mean,” said Thorndyke, “that on the 7th of June, after nine o’clock
at night, you entered the dwelling-house of Mr. Blowgrave and stole
and carried away certain of his goods and chattels. A part of them you
have restored, but you are still in possession of some of the stolen
property, to wit, a scarab and a deed-box.”
As Thorndyke made this statement in his calm, level tones, Bowker’s
face blanched to a tallowy white, and he stood staring at my
colleague, the very picture of astonishment and dismay. But he fired a
last shot.
“This is sheer midsummer madness,” he exclaimed huskily; “and you know
it.”
Thorndyke turned to our host. “It is for you to settle, Mr.
Blowgrave,” said he. “I hold conclusive evidence that Mr. Bowker stole
your deed-box. If you decide to prosecute I shall produce that
evidence in court and he will certainly be convicted.”
Blowgrave and his daughter looked at the accused man with an
embarrassment almost equal to his own.
“I am astounded,” the former said at length; “but I don’t want to be
vindictive. Look here, Harold, hand over the scarab and we’ll say no
more about it.”
“You can’t do that,” said Thorndyke. “The law doesn’t allow you to
compound a robbery. He can return the property if he pleases and you
can do as you think best about prosecuting. But you can’t make
conditions.”
There was silence for some seconds; then, without another word, the
crestfallen adventurer turned, and scrambling up out of the pit, took
a hasty departure.
It was nearly a couple of hours later that, after a leisurely wash and
a hasty, nondescript meal, we carried the little chest from the
dining-room to the study. Here, when he had closed the French window
and drawn the curtains, Mr. Blowgrave produced a set of tools and we
fell to work on the iron fastenings of the chest. It was no light
task, though a century’s rust had thinned the stout bands, but at
length the lid yielded to the thrust of a long case-opener and rose
with a protesting creak. The chest was lined with a double thickness
of canvas, apparently part of a sail, and contained a number of small
leathern bags, which, as we lifted them out, one by one, felt as if
they were filled with pebbles. But when we untied the thongs of one
and emptied its contents into a wooden bowl, Blowgrave heaved a sigh
of ecstasy and Miss Nellie uttered a little scream of delight. They
were all cut stones, and most of them of exceptional size; rubies,
emeralds, sapphires, and a few diamonds. As to their value, we could
form but the vaguest guess; but Thorndyke, who was a fair judge of
gem-stones, gave it as his opinion that they were fine specimens of
their kind, though roughly cut, and that they had probably formed the
enrichment of some shrine.
“The question is,” said Blowgrave, gazing gloatingly on the bowl of
sparkling gems, “what are we to do with them?”
“I suggest,” said Thorndyke, “that Dr. Jervis stays here to-night to
help you to guard them and that in the morning you take them up to
London and deposit them at your bank.”
Blowgrave fell in eagerly with this suggestion, which I seconded.
“But,” said he, “that chest is a queer-looking package to be carrying
abroad. Now, if we only had that confounded deed-box----”
“There’s a deed-box on the cabinet behind you,” said Thorndyke.
Blowgrave turned round sharply. “God bless us!” he exclaimed. “It has
come back the way it went. Harold must have slipped in at the window
while we were at tea. Well, I’m glad he has made restitution. When I
look at that bowl and think what he must have narrowly missed, I don’t
feel inclined to be hard on him. I suppose the scarab is inside--not
that it matters much now.”
The scarab was inside in an envelope; and as Thorndyke turned it over
in his hand and examined the hieroglyphics on it through his lens,
Miss Blowgrave asked: “Is it of any value, Dr. Thorndyke? It can’t
have any connection with the secret of the hiding-place, because you
found the jewels without it.
“By the way, Doctor, I don’t know whether it is permissible for me to
ask, but how on earth _did_ you find out where the jewels were hidden?
To me it looks like black magic.”
Thorndyke laughed in a quiet, inward fashion. “There is nothing
magical about it,” said he. “It was a perfectly simple,
straightforward problem. But Miss Nellie is wrong. We had the scarab;
that is to say we had the wax impression of it, which is the same
thing. And the scarab was the key to the riddle. You see,” he
continued, “Silas’s letter and the scarab formed together a sort of
intelligence test.”
“Did they?” said Blowgrave. “Then he drew a blank every time.”
Thorndyke chuckled. “His descendants were certainly a little lacking
in enterprise,” he admitted. “Silas’s instructions were perfectly
plain and explicit. Whoever would find the treasure must first acquire
some knowledge of Egyptian lore and must study the scarab attentively.
It was the broadest of hints, but no one--excepting Harold Bowker, who
must have heard about the scarab from his Uncle Arthur--seems to have
paid any attention to it.
“Now it happens that I have just enough elementary knowledge of the
hieroglyphic characters to enable me to spell them out when they are
used alphabetically; and as soon as I saw the seal, I could see that
these hieroglyphics formed English words. My attention was first
attracted by the second group of signs, which spelled the word
‘Reuben,’ and then I saw that the first group spelled ‘Uncle.’ Of
course, the instant I heard Miss Nellie speak of the connection
between the scarab and Uncle Reuben, the murder was out. I saw at a
glance that the scarab contained all the required information. Last
night I made a careful tracing of the hieroglyphics and then rendered
them into our own alphabet. This is the result.”
He took from his letter-case and spread out on the table a duplicate
of the tracing which I had seen him make, and of which he had given me
a copy. But since I had last seen it, it had received an addition;
under each group of signs the equivalents in modern Roman lettering
had been written, and these made the following words:
“UNKL RUBN IS IN TH MILL FIELD SKS FT DOWN CHURCH SPIR NORTH TEN
THIRTY EAST DINGL SOUTH GABL NORTH ATY FORTY FIF WST GOD SAF KING
JORJ.”
image: img_035
caption:
The transliteration of the hieroglyphics.
Our two friends gazed at Thorndyke’s transliteration in blank
astonishment. At length Blowgrave remarked: “But this translation must